Religion in History 



AND IN 



MODERN LIFE 



TOGETHER WITH AN ESSAY ON THE CHURCH 
AND THE WORKING CLASSES 



BY 

A. M:"^FAIRBAIRN. D.D. 

PRINCIPAL OF MANSFIELD COLLEGE, OXFORD 




NEW YORK 

E. R. HERRICK & COMPANY 
70 FIFTH AVENUE 






'^Quench not the Spirit; despise not prophesyings ; prove 
all things ; hold fast that which is good ; abstain from every 
form of evil, 

^'^ And the God of peace Himself sanctify you wholly ; and 
may your spi7nt and soul and body be preserved entire, without 
blame, at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ,''^ — 1 Thess. v. 
19-23. 



^y Transfer 



O 



withdrawn 
4538y 



Public Library, 

RECEIVED, 

FEB -9 1903 



V 



Wasliiiigton,D.C, 



RELIGION IN HISTORY 

AND IN 

MODERN LIFE 



^^Nevertheless it is open to serious question^ which Heave to 
the reader^ s ponderiiig, whether, among national manufac- 
tures, that of souls of a good quality may not at last turn out a 
quite leadingly lucrative one ? Nay, in some far-away and yet 
undreamt-of hour, I can even imagine that England may cast 
all thoughts of possessing wealth back to the barbaric nations 
among whom they first arose ; and that, while the sands of the 
Indus and adamant of Golconda my yet stiffen the housings of 
the charger, and flash from the turban of the slave, she, as a 
Christian mother, may at last attain to the virtues and the 
treasures of a heathen one, and be able to lead forth her sons, 
saying: ^ These are my jewels.'' ^^ — Ruskin, ''Unto this 
Last," ii. 

" The people are the most important element [in a country] ; 
the sjoirits of the land and grain are the next ; the ruler is the 
lightest, 

" Therefore, to gam the peasantry is the way to become the 
son of Heaven ; to gain the son of Heaven is the way to become 
the prince of a state ; to gain the prince of a state is the way 
to become a great officer ^ — "Mencius," Book viL, Part ii., 
Chapter xiv. 

^''It was the lesson of our great ancestor: — 
The people should be cherished, 
And not looked down upon. 
The people are the root of a country; 
The rootflrm, the country is tranquil. 

Should dissatisfaction be waited for till it appears ? 
Before it is seen, it should be guarded against. 
In my dealings with the millions of the people, 
I should feel as much anxiety as if I were driving 
six horses with rotten reins.^^ 

The Shti King, Part i., Book iii. 

*' Nothing is more becoming to him who governs than to de- 
spise no m.an and not shoio arrogance, but to preside over all 
with equal care.^' — Epictetus, "Encheiridion," cxxxii. 



PREFACE. 



This little book is republished in response to much 
friendly pressure which has come from many sides. 
While it has been revised throughout, and in certain 
places expanded, yet expansion has not been found 
possible where it was most needed — in the conclud- 
ing lecture. But this is the less regretted as the 
book is not an essay in what it is the fashion to call 
Christian Economics, but rather a discussion as to 
the nature and action of the Christian Religion as 
it has revealed and fulfilled itself in history. Ab- 
stract economics, even though deduced from the 
Sermon on the Mount, are more likely to be ingenious 
than either relevant to the original or practicable 
in the present, ideals that do not so much produce 
realities as become apologies for their absence. A 
man wiio is a good exegete but an inexperienced 
economist, is no more able to apply the Xew Testa- 
ment to our social and industrial problems, than 
the man who is an expert economist but a stranger 
to the New Testament. To make knowledge of the 
one subject a reason for attempting to wTite on both, 
is simply to show how foolish a reasonable man may 
be, for it is nowhere so hard to tliink truly and speak 



vi Religion in History, 

wisely as in the application of simple maxims to 
complex problems. This, of course, does not mean 
either that the ethics of Christ ought not, or that 
they cannot be applied to modern economics; on the 
contrary, the whole argument of the book is gov- 
erned by the conviction that they ought to be so 
applied, and that the whole past life of the Christian 
Religion has been a series of efforts to embody itself 
in a higher social and economical order. From 
these efforts the religion cannot desist, and against 
the hindrances to them it must for evermore contend. 
But then in order to the success of this contention 
the churches must see clearly that they may strike 
boldly; to hit blindly is only to inflict damage all 
round. 

Now, the author is not a student of economics — 
in this region he feels rather than sees, but he is a 
student of the history of religion, and he feels more 
able to define the duty and function of religion in 
the present when he comes to it through the experi- 
ence of the past. And this is all he really professes to 
do, but even so, this is no little or insignificant thing 
to attempt. In studying the history and the action of 
Christian ideas, we move in the region of the actual, 
and learn through what the religion has done, what 
it is capable of doing, what it has failed to do, why 
it has failed to do it, and what it ought now to set 
itself to accomplish. The historical thus becomes 
a most practical discussion, and forms a necessary 
and sobering introduction to every attempt to deal 
either critically or constructively with the economic 
functions of the Christian religion. But the author 



Preface. vii 

has no wish to escape, under the disguise of an histori- 
cal discussion, the grave responsibility which lies 
upon every Christian teacher to apply his religion 
to the present. His sense of this responsibility, 
within the limits defined by the origin and purpose 
of the lectures, is partially expressed in the essay on 
^^The Church and the Wording Classes." Without 
this recognition of duty he could not have allowed 
this book to go forth in a new edition. 

Perhaps it may be as wefl to recall the original 
purpose of the Lectures which form the body of the 
book. The author was then resident in the neigh- 
bourhood of Bradford, and he volunteered to address 
the working men of the town on ^ ^ Religion in His- 
tory," expressly through the press inviting them to 
attend. His purpose was thus stated in the Preface 
to the First Edition: — 

^ ^ The reasons which induced me to take so un- 
usual a step had a twofold source; first, the strong 
conviction of what Religion is, and what it ought to 
do; and, secondly, the feeling that it is the duty of 
the special student to become, as far as possible, a 
teacher of the people, especially in matters where 
the people so much need instruction, and where 
instruction is so necessary to their highest good. 
Our hard-worked ministers and clergy have quite 
enough to do without attempting labour of this 
kind; yet it is labour that ought to be done. The 
ordinary pulpit leaves many questions undiscussed, 
and the ordinary congregation does not desire or 
require their discussion; yet they are questions 



viii Religion in History, 

everywhere anxiously debated by earnest and most 
excellent men. It is easy, through the press, to 
reach the cultivated and leisured classes; it is not 
so easy, indeed to many it is quite impossible, to 
reach the industrial classes through it. Yet these 
latter are often the more susceptible, with natures 
more open to conviction, more fully convinced, if 
convinced at all. Some things that had recently 
happened within m.y own experience, made me very 
vividly aware of the peculiar forms our religious 
problems and difficulties assume among our working 
men, and this discovery led to the feeling of obliga- 
tion that resulted in the delivery of these Lectures. 
I felt bound, as a student and teacher of the Chris- 
tian religion, to speak to my fellow townsmen, es- 
pecially those of the industrial classes, concerning 
questions they were discussing and honestly trying 
to understand. 

''The Lectures were determined alike as to mat- 
ter and form by their purpose. They are not apolo- 
getic in the customary sense, bitt I hope they are 
something better, because more relevant to the act- 
ual state of mind of the persons addressed. It will 
be but just if they are judged according to their real 
intention and scope, and in no respect as a polemi- 
cal and controversial endeavour." 



December 10, 1893. 



*• The King said to his people : ' The good in you I will not 
dare to keep concealed ; and for the evil in me I will not dare 
to forgive myself, I will examine these things in harmony 
with the mind of God, When guilt is found anytvhere in you 
who occupy the myriad regions, let it rest on me, the One man. 
When guilt is found iJi me, the One man, it shall not attach to 
you who occupy the myriad regions.' " — '' The Shu King," Part 
iv., Book iii., Part 3. 

^^ Heaven loves the people, and the sovereign should reverently 
carry out (this mind of) Heaven.''' — lb., Part v., Book i., § 2. 

^^ The ancients have said, ^ He who soothes us is our sov- 
ereign; he who oppresses us is our enemy. " — lb.. Part v., 
Book i., § 3. 

** A state exists for the sake of a good life, and not for the 
sake of life only : if life only icere the object, slaves and brute 
animals might form a state ; but they cannot, for they have no 
share in happiness or in a life of free choice. . . . Whence 
it may be further inferred that virtue must he the serious care 
of a state %ohich truly deserves the name : for (without this 
ethical end) the community becomes a mere alliance which dif- 
fers only in place from alliances of which the members live 
apart; and law is only a convention, ' a surety to one another 
of justice,' as the sophist Lycophron says, and has no real 
power to make the citizens good and just." — Aristotle, ''Poli- 
tics," Book i., § 9. 

'^It has been well said that ^ he who has never learned to 
obey cannot be a good commander.' The two are not the same, 
but the good citizen ought to be capable of both; he should 
know how to govern like a. freeman, and how to obey like a 
freeman — these are the virtues of a citizen." — lb., Book iii., § 4. 

'' Two principles are characteristic of democracy, the gov- 
ernment of the majority and freedom. Men think that what is 
just is equal ; and that equality is the supremacy of the popular 
will; and that freedom and equality mean the doing what a 
man likes. In such democracies every one lives as he pleases, 
or in the words of Euripides, 'according to his fancy.' But 
this is all wrong ; men should not think it slavery to live ac- 
cording to the rule of the constitution ; for it is their salvation." 
lb., Book v., § 9. 

'^ Neither is a horse elated nor proud of his manger and 
trappings and coverings, nor a bird of his little shreds of 
cloth or of his nest : but both of them are proud of their swift- 
ness ; one proud of the swiftness of the feet, and the other of 
the wings. Do you also, then, not be greatly proud of your 
food and dress, and, in short, of any external things, but be 
proud of your integrity and good deeds {evitoiia)." — EpictetuS; 
^' Encheiridion," xxvi. 



CONTENTS. 



THE CHURCH AND THE WORKING CLASSES. 

PAGE 

1. Its Changed Attitude to the Working Classes — 

The Religious Causes of this Change and its Forms 1 
Its Effects on Diff'erent Classes of Societ}^ . . 3 
The New and Practical Interest in Labour Ques- 
tions 6 

2. The Attitude of the Men to the Churches — 

Less Change in their Attitude .... 10 
The Alienation from the Churches . . .11 

3. Causes, Apparent and Real, of Alienation — 

Distrust of the Churches rather than Disbelief at 

Work 15 

The Loss of Adaptation by the Church to its Envir- 
onment 18 

4. Influence of the Political Development — 

The Organic Relation of Political and Religious 

Thought 22 

The Conflict of the New Ideas and the Old Order 

in the French Revolution .... 25 

The New Ideas and the English Churches . . 26 

The Church to-day must be as the State is . . 29 

5. Influence of Society and the Social Spirit — 

Divisive Social Tendencies 31 

Their Action within the Churches, how^ to be 

checked 33 

6. Influence of the Industrial Development — 

Its Hostility to the Cultivation of the Religious 

Spirit 37 

The Remedies and the Counteragencies required . 39 



xii Contents. 

PAGE 

7. Influence of the Intellectual Movement — 

The Literature and Educative Forces of Modern 

Life 42 

Religious Education as it is and as it ought to be 46 

8. The Conciliation of the Alienated — 

The Church to be faithful to its Mission . . 49 

Its Influence on the Mind, the Life, and the Home 54 

9. Ukgency of the Need — 

The Modern Democracj^: our Last Reserves , 58 
The Rulers must be ruled 61 



LECTURE I. 

What is Religion? 

Clearness in our Idea of it necessary ... 65 

1. The Relation of the Churches to it . . .67 

2. It is universal and natural to Man . . .71 

3. Philosophical Explanations 77 

4. Its Highest Conception determines its Character 86 
By it the Ends of God realized through Man . 87 

LECTURE II. 

The Place and Significance of the Old 
Testament in Religion. 

Restatement of Temper and Principles of Inquiry 92 

95 

99 

104 

107 

111 



1. The Scientific Method of Study 
Popular Difficulties concerning the Bible . 

2. The Old Testament the History of a Religion 
The Name and Character of God . 
The Hebrew People and its Faith . 



Contents, xlii 

PAGE 

3. The Regulative and Organizing Power of a Great 

Conception 114 

The Mosaic Ideal of Religion . . . .117 

4. Its Notion of Man as moral 119 

And of the State as the same . . . .121 

5. The Law in Other Relations 123 

The Spiritual and Moral Wealth of the Old 

Testament ........ 127 

LECTURE III. 

The Place axd Sigxificance of the New 
Testament ix Religion. 

1. The Old Testament the Primary Source of our 

Moral Ideals in Religion 132 

The New Testament inherits and universalizes 

THESE 13(j 

2. Christ and the Traditional Ideals of His Day . 138 

His Own Ideal 141 

The Kingdom of God, its Embodiment . . . 142 

3. The Christian Ideas of God and of Man . .145 
These Ideas, how related in Christianity and in 

OTHER Religions 151 

4. The Lenity of Mankind in the City of God . .154 
Christianity a Religion of Redemption . .159 

5. Christ's Influence on Personalities . . .163 
The Redeemer and Leader of Progress . . 166 

LECTURE IV. 

The Christian Religion in the First Fifteen 
Centuries of its Existence. 

The Scope and Purpose of the Lecture . .160 

1. The Distinctive Notes of Early Christianity . 173 

2. The Influence of certain old Pagan and Judaic 

Ideas 183 




xiv Contents, 

PAGE 

3. The Effect of Christian Ideas on the Industrial and 

Social System of Ancient Rome . . .187 

4. The Action of the Christian Faith on the Life of Man 193 

LECTURE y. 

The Cheistian Religion in Modern Europe. 

The Energy and the Pain of Modern Life . . 199 

1. The Power of the Churches and the Strength of Faith 201 

2. The Renaissance and the Reformation . . . 205 

3. The Influence of Calvin 209 

4. Liberty, Political and Religious, whence sprung . 213 
Its Source in the Religion of Christ . . . 218 

Equality 224 

Fraternity 225 

The Amelioratiye Forces of Modern Society . .226 

LECTURE YI. 

The Christian Religion in Modern Life. 

The Province of Religion 229 

1. Ultimate Ideas AND THE Organization OF Societies . 231 
The Evolution of the Modern Christian Ideal of 

Humanity 234 

2. Various Ancient and Modern Ideals compared here- 

with 236 

The Architectonic Power of the Christian Religion 243 

3. Its Application in Various Departments of Life . 245 
The Ideal of Christ our Hope yq& the Future , ,260 



''Behold my servant, whom I uphold ; my chosen^ in whom 
my soul delighteth : I have put my spirit upon him ; he shall 
bring forth judgment to the Oentiles. He shall not cry, nor 
lift up, nor cquse his voice to be heard in the street, A bruised 
reed shall he not break, and the smoking flax shall he not 
quench : he shall bring forth judgment in truth. He shall not 
fail nor he discouraged, till he have set judgment in the earth ; 
a?id thelsles shall wait for his law,'^ — Isaiah xlii. 1-4. 

''And he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up : 
and he entered, as his custom ivas, into the synagogue on the sab- 
bath day, and stood up to read. And there was delivered unto 
him the book of the prophet Isaiah. And he opened the book, 
and found the place where it was written, 

' The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, 
Because he anointed me to preach good tidings to the 

poor : 
He hath sent me to proclaim release to the captives, 
And recovering of sight to the blind. 
To set at liberty them that are bruised, 
To proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.'' " 

St. Luke iv. 16-19. 

*' For when the ear heard me, then it blessed me : 
And when the eye saw me, it gave witness unto me : 
Because I delivered the poor that cried. 
The fatherless also, that had none to help him. 
The blessing of him that was ready to perish came 

upon me : 
And I caused the widow'' s heart to sing for joy, 
I put on righteousness, and it clothed me : 
My justice was as a robe and a diadem, 
I was eyes to the blind. 
And feet was I to the lame. 
I was a father to the needy : 
And the cause of him that I knew not I searched out.^' 

Job xxix. 11-16. 

** Bender to no man evil for evil. Take thought for things 
honourable in the sight of all men. If it be possible, as much 
as in you lieth^ be at peace with all men,^^ — Romans xii. 17, 18, 



THE CHURCH AND THE 
WORKING CLASSES 



'' The Working Classes cannot any longer go on inthout gov- 
ernment; without being SiCtnsiWy guided aiid gove7V2ed; Engla7id 
cannot subsist in peace till, by some means or other, some 
guidance and government for them is found.^'' — Carlyle, 
''Chartism," Chapter vi. 

'* There is not a hamlet where poor peasants congregate, 
but, by one means and another, a Church- Apparatus has been 
got together, — roofed edifice, with revenues and belfries; pul- 
pit, reading-desk, with Books and Methods : possibility, in 
short, and strict prescription, That a man stand there and 
speak of spiritual things to men. It is beautiful ; — eveyi in its 
great obscuration and decadence, it is among the beautifulest, 
most touching objects one sees on the Earth. This Speaking Ma7i 
has indeed, in these times, wandered terribly from the point ; 
has, alas, as it were, totally lost sight of th^e point : yet, at bot- 
tom, whom have we to compare with him ? Of all public func- 
tionaries boarded and lodged on the Industry of Modern 
Eui^ope, is there one worthier of the board he has ? A man 
even professing, and never so languidly making still some 
endeavour, to save the souls of men: contrast him with a man 
professing to do little but shoot the partridges of men 1 I wish 
he could find the point again, this Speaking One; and stick to 
it with tenacity, with deadly energy; for there is need of him 
yet ! The Speaking Function, this of Truth coming to us with 
a living voice, nay in a living shape, and as a conc7^ete prac- 
tical exemplar: this, icith all our Writing and Frinting Func- 
tions, has a perennial place. Could he but find the point 
again, — take the old spectacles off his nose, and looking up 
discover, almost in contact with him, what the real Satanas 
and soul-devouring, woj^ld-devouring Devil, 7iow is ! 07Hginal 
Sin and suchlike are bad enoughs I doubt not : but distilled Gi7i, 
da7^k Ignorance, Stupidity, daik Corn-Law, Bastille and Com- 
pany, what are they ! Will he discover our new real Satan, 
whom he has to fight ; or go 07i droning through his old nose- 
spectacles about old extinct Satans; and never see the real 
one, till he feel him at his own throat a7id ours ? That is a 
question, for the wo7'ld 1 " — Carlyle, '' Past and Present," Book 
iv., Chapter i. 



RELIGION IN HISTORY AND IN 
MODERN LIFE. 



CHAPTER I. 

THE CHURCH AND THE WORKING CLASSES. 

It is now almost ten years since these Lectures 
were delivered, and this period is remarkable for 
the growth in all religious societies of a new feeling 
for our workmen, and of responsibilitj^ in connexion 
with their special problems. 

1. The causes and forms of this latest and most 
hopeful outgrowth of the Christian conscience are 
many and most varied. The generous and trustful 
humanity of the older Christian Socialists — Maurice. 
Kingsley, and Hughes — fired the enthusiasm of their 
disciples, and led them^ now as teachers and now as 
co-operators, through personal intercourse to such a 
knowledge of working men, their character, their 
capacity, their aims and claims, as awakened a new 
sense of affinity with their manhood, and sympathy 



2 Religion in History, 

with their efforts after amelioration. The extension 
of primary and the reform of secondary education 
made the more open-minded men of the older nni- 
versities, see the intellectual promise and abilities of 
those who had hitherto been excluded from the 
higher culture. The finely blended speculative and 
practical genius of T. II. Green became a passion 
for the realization of the ideals of freedom and justice 
in all the grades of our social and in all the forms of 
our national life, and his personal influence imparted 
his passion to several generations of university men^ 
who later expressed it in their own ways^ now in 
economics^ now in politics, and now in the church. 
The study of the industrial revolution in the spirit 
and through the philosophy of Green made Arnold 
Toynbee feel that the man who tended the machine 
must no longer be sacrificed to the machine he 
tended, but be made, even by the craft he followed, 
better as a man and more efficient as a citizen. The 
teachings of Carlyle distilled through Ruskin, and 
woven by him into the theories of art and the criti- 
cisms of life that were his message to the age, 
inspired with a will for service many who would 
otherwise have wasted their sensitive enthusiasm in 
admiration of dubious art. The Anglican revival, 
like the older evangelical, became in many of its 
sons a love of souls, and certain both of its priests 
and laymen made the East End of London the scene 
of as unselfish labours and as consecrated lives as 
the most heroic ages of the Church have known. 

The result of these and similar causes is the 
varied movements, outwardly so different, which have 



The Church and the Working_ Classes. 3 

had as their common end help of the working classes, 
especially those whose lot is hardest and least hope- 
ful. Hence have come Toynbee Hall wdth its sane 
and sagacious belief in the value of art for the 
squalid East End, and its brave endeavour to educate 
the universities by means of Whitechapel, and to 
save Whitechapel by the culture and service of the 
universities; Oxford House, with its intense con- 
viction of the mission of the Church to the masses, 
though of a mission that the ordinary ecclesiastical 
agencies and methods are quite unable to fulfil: 
Mansfield House, w^th its strong, practical spirit, 
seeking to improve the houses, the amusements, the 
minds, the relationships, and the lives of the workers 
in the farther East End; the Wesleyan settlement at 
Eermondsey, with its noble religious zeal and broad 
philanthropy attempting at once to heal the bodies 
and save the souls of those it can reach; University 
Hall, w4th its intellectual energy and its belief in 
knowledge as a saving and civilizing power; and 
besides these a multitude of houses and missions in- 
dependently and separately maintained by colleges 
and public schools. 

But the first broad and most apparent result of 
these varied institutions is this, they have affected 
much more profoundly those who have conducted 
them than those for whose sakes they are being con- 
ducted. Men who, left to the ordinary tendencies of 
nurture and culture, would have seen things only 
through the eyes of the propertied and leisured 
classes, have come or are coming to study them 
through the eyes of those who eat their bread in the 



4 Religion in History, 

sweat of their brow, often finding but little bread for 
all their sweat and toil. And it has been found 
surely enough that the same things look wonderfully 
different when seen from those two opposite points 
of view. For largely out of these settlements, and 
the influences by which they have persuaded cultured 
minds to occupy, sympathetically, the standpoint of 
the labourer, there has come both an academic and a 
religious socialism, which is powerfully modifying 
political, economical, and ecclesiastical doctrine, and 
which promises to affect the teaching and practice 
of the churches as radically as it is affecting the 
spirit and the scope of our civil legislation. We are 
witnessing a process of conversion, but it is of the 
missionaries at the unconscious hands of those they 
were sent out to convert; and this is a process which 
may have the most momentous results for the future 
of society and religion in England. 

2. But correspondent to the new feeling which 
these causes have been contributing to produce in the 
churches, is the birth of a new spirit in the lower 
labour. It is possessed of a hopefulness which may 
be described as the child of a new sense, — on the one 
side, of internal competence or capability, and on 
the other, of the sympathy which comes from being 
better understood. In other words, it does not feel 
so much in bondage to its own infirmities, or so 
much an outcast from the community of freedom and 
progress and hope. This has been illustrated by 
those recent events in our economic history, which 
showed, first, the ability of the classes that live by 
what is termed unskilled labour to conceive methods 



The Church and the Working Classes. 5 

and to use means for their own amelioration, and 
even to combine in support of them; and secondly, 
the willingness of classes once hostile or indifferent 
to assume a kindlier and more intelligent attitude 
to the disputes of labour, and even the tendency to 
regard its questions as the concern not simply of 
economics, but of social ethics. This spirit of sym- 
pathy from without labour which has so cheered the 
upward impulse from within it, stands in notable 
contrast to the jealous and fretful criticism which 
hindered and harassed the earliest attempts of the 
skilled workmen at combination. Both of these are 
hopeful elements, for the men who can design a pol- 
i3y of social and industrial improvement and unite 
ii its support, have become something more and bet- 
ter than day labourers; wiiile the society that looks at 
an industrial question through living persons and in 
its effects upon them, and not simply through the 
abstract ideas of capital and labour, production and 
distribution, has translated the problem as to wealth 
into one as to well-being. The laws of political 
economy may be regarded in the one case, as in the 
other, as expressing actual processes or relations 
between co-ordinated phenomena, but they will be 
supplemented in tlie one case, as they Avould not be 
in the other, by the attem.pt to discover those coun- 
tervailing forces, or to create those modifying con- 
ditions, that shall change their morally indifferent or 
sectionally injurious action into one socially and col- 
lectively beneficent. For economics may show the 
need of change, and the alternative lines along which 
it may move; but it is the function of the social con- 



6 Religion in History, 

science to say which line the common good makes 
the more imperative. Thus economics may tell that 
either rent, or interest, or wages, must rise or fall, 
but it belongs to ethics to say which of these has 
the prior right to consideration in the adjustment 
of the -jpward or downward scale. 

We may, then, venture to affirm that the ethical 
is the strongest and most significant tendency in 
social and political thought. And so men are com- 
ing to see more clearly that, for moral rather than 
economical reasons, questions between classes are 
never merely class questions, and that what depresses 
the standard of living in any one class lowers the 
level and worth of life throughout the community as 
a whole. And this idea is so penetrating the com- 
munity that we see it daily becoming more distinctly 
conscious that it is as responsible for safeguarding 
the skill which is the sole property of the artisan, 
and, as far as possible, securing his happiness also, 
as for protecting his employer in the use and enjoy- 
ment of his capital. And this is a point which the 
industrial struggle through which we are even now 
passing with so much pain and shame, is only the 
more defining and emphasizing. In no previous 
economic struggle has the sense of justice within the 
community been so widely and deeply touched, or so 
vigorously expressed. The feeling has grown that 
both masters and men have a responsibility to the 
community as well as to each other, and that the 
community has such a responsibility to both as will 
not allow it to stand as an idle or uninterested 
spectator of the disastrous strife. The awakening 



The Church and the Working Classes, 1 

sense of justice means that legislation embodying it 
will most surely follow, and this legislation will seek 
to deal justly with both classes — with the demand 
of the men for a living wage, and of the masters for 
guarded property and fair profits, — and will attempt 
to secure that each class shall deal justly by the 
other, and both by the community as a whole. It 
seems, then, as if we were tending towai*ds a state 
where we shall have greater unity of feeling and 
solidarity of ethical interests; and where these are, 
there will be more of the pressure of the community 
upon the class than of the dominion of the class over 
the community, though, it must be confessed, this is 
a state where wisdom and justice are demanded as 
they were never demanded or needed before. 

3. Now, the most efficient factors of this change 
have been many, labour itself being the most efficient 
factor of all. Our workmen are no longer dumb; 
we cannot now speak of them with Carlj le as the 
inarticulate multitude. They have a mind of their 
own and a most potent voice, while they have been 
represented by many convinced and persuasive 
spokesmen. The economics of the school and the 
study do not now reign in undisputed supremacy; 
they are confronted and challenged by the economics 
of the workshop and the trades-union. And while 
we may here leave thesis and antithesis to qualify 
each other, we must confess that not only has the 
workman's experience forced the student to modify 
his doctrines, but his arguments have also conquered 
many of the prejudices and modified the mind of our 
English public, Avhich. though often unreasonable and 



8 Religion in History, 

hard to convince^ is invariably^ when convinced, a 
mind both honest and just. Yet while the workmen 
themselves have been the most efficient factors of this 
changed attitude to their questions, we may say that 
those who have given the most remarkable and em- 
phatic expression to the change have been churchmen, 
princes of the Roman, bishops of the Anglican, pas- 
tors of the Nonconformist communions. It is not said 
or meant that these were the men who formulated the 
principles or inaugurated the movements that effected 
the change, — this, we have just said, the workmen 
were and the churchmen certainly were not; but they 
expressed it, gave the sort of social sanction that made 
society aware of the process that was going forward, 
of the new feelings towards labour, its state and 
claims, that were rising within it. The really signifi- 
cant thing is that Roman priests, English bishops, 
and dissenting ministers have so tried to intervene, or 
have so succeeded in intervening, as arbiters between 
masters and workmen as to express the idea that 
conflicts between capital and labour concern as well 
the whole community, and especially the religious 
societies within it, as the immediate parties to the 
quarrel. They represent the pressure of the more 
reasonable social mind, or the more sensitive con- 
science, upon the belligerents. This is the most ob- 
vious moral to be drawn from the negotiations, wheth- 
er successful or abortive, in connection with the strikes 
of the dockers in London, the shoemakers at North- 
ampton, the miners in Durham, and with the locked- 
out at Hull. These events have not, indeed, the 
intrinsic significance of the fact we noticed above. 



The Church and the Working Classes 9 

the action of the working men on the strong and sen- 
sitive minds that have chosen to work for or live 
among them. Those events are significant as ex- 
pressing common tendencies and achieved results, 
but this action as denoting nascent yet potent causes. 
The meaning of the former can in a manner be already 
measured, the latter is only a little bit of leaven just 
begun to act within the iiimp. 



CHAPTER IT. 

THE ATTITUDE OF THE MEN TO THE CHURCHES. 

1. But while the churches through their most 
honoured representatives, or through their strongest 
and most resolute sons, liave turned this friendly and 
helpful face towards labour, Avhat has been its cor- 
respondent or reciprocal attitude ? The help has 
been accepted with a sort of proud yet indulgent 
gratitude, as if for duty at last performed by one 
who had not been accustomed to perform it; but 
there has been little sign of any changed attitude to 
the faith and worship of the Church. The men who 
represent labour, and the labour they represent, may 
be quite willing to enlist the ecclesiastic as a recruit, 
but they show no inclination of joining the army he 
leads, or of submitting to his discipline. They may 
hail the attempt of the Church to fulfil economic 
functions, whether as mediator or as teacher, or even 
seriously propose to capture her as the chosen citadel 
of the capitalist, and turn her into the stronghold 
of labour and the minister of the democracy; but 
they do not mean to commit themselves to her, 
whether as regards her policy for this life or her 
dogmas as to the life to come. Nor need we wonder 



The Attitude of the Men to the Church, 11 

at their attitude; we are rather tempted to commend 
it as both reasonable and reverent. The Church is 
infinitely more than an economic institution; the man 
or society would be a secularist of the very worst 
type who would enter it simply because of its promise 
to be profitable for the life that now is. This is a 
reason worthy of the suitor for social recognition, 
but not of the blunt integrity of the English work- 
man. Then all churches are historical institutions; 
the attitude to them of classes and bodies of men is 
also historical. Agreement on a current question 
does not afiect an attitude which depends on ancient 
and permanent causes. If, then^ we would discover 
how the Church and the industrial classes are to be 
reconciled, we must inquire into those causes which 
worked their estrangement and still keep them 
estranged. This estrangement is too general to be 
explained by any local or accidental or occasional 
cause, or indeed any cause that affects only one of 
the two sides. The causes are of so common and so 
essential a kind that they have affected and do affect 
equally the churches and the industrial classes, both 
in themselves and in their mutual relations. 

2. It may be doubted whether the estrangement 
can properly be described as general; but it is 
general in this sense that (the Graeco-Russian Church 
does not come into our purview) it is a state which 
all churches know and have cause to lament. The 
experience of the Roman Church is not uniform, but 
it is decisive enough. There is no country where 
the anti-clerical and anti-Church feeling is so strong 
as in France, and it is intensest — becoming almost a 



12 Religion in History. 

sort of fanaticism — in the artisan class. The Belgian 
workman is less demonstrative and more tolerant 
than his French neighbour, but quite as little does 
he love the Church. There is no Church in the 
United States that suffers so much from leakage, or 
the loss of those immigrants and their descendants 
who were hers by race, as the Roman Catholic. It 
is, of course, different in Ireland, in the South 
American Republics, and in certain of the countries 
of Southern Europe; but it is only different in these 
cases because the industrial development has been 
arrested, or has not well begun. In the case of 
Ireland, indeed, there is this special characteristic: 
Catholicism and patriotism have only been different 
aspects of the same thing, church and people lay 
under the same disabilities, suffered from the same 
penal laws, and were therefore one in their conflict 
for justice and freedom. But as regards the general 
question the significant thing is, that where industry 
has been so far developed as to allow the causes 
which most tend to alienation to operate, the Roman 
religion has, so far from preventing, emphasized 
and exasperated the effect. The Anglican Church, 
too, has here failed signally, often in spite of 
her many beneficences, sometimes even because 
of the form her beneficences have assumed. There 
are districts in England where, if it had not been 
for certain dissenting bodies, paganism would have 
practically prevailed. Her debt to those bodies she 
can never pay, and, unhappily, she is not always 
willing even to recognize it, at least in a form that 
an honourable creditor can regard as recognition. 



The Attitude of the 3Ien to the Church. 13 

Methodism^ in its several branclies, has done more 
for the conversion and reconciliation of certain of the 
industrial classes to religion than any other English 
Church. It is but just to say that the enfranchisement of 
our mining and agricultural populations made this evi- 
dent, that their regulative ideas were religious rather 
than utilitarian and secular. The politician finds when 
he addresses the peasantry that he has to appeal to 
more distinctly ethical and religious principles than 
when he addresses the upper or middle classes, and 
we may hope that even in a politician the principles 
he appeals to may ultimately affect his policy. 
Meanwhi-.e we simply note that it is the local 
preacher rather than the secularist lecturer who has, 
while converting the soul, really formed the mind of 
the miner and labourer, and who now so largely rep- 
resents the ideas he seeks in his dim and inarticulate 
way to see applied to national policy and legislation. 
The Congregational and the Presbyterian Churches 
have been more successful with the middle than with 
either the lower or the upper classes; they may in- 
deed be said to represent the older English Noncon- 
formity, but while the latter is largely Scotch, the 
former inherits tlie mind and traditions of the burgh- 
ers and the yeomen who formed the main body of 
the Independents of the Commonwealth. Theirs 
were the men who governed England from '32 to '68, 
and who have not been inactive since then. They 
are mainly the men who have created our industries 
and extended our commerce, and made the con- 
science for integrity and economy in the English 
race. These things are not said by way of 



14 Beligion in History. 

polemic against any churchy or of apologetic 
on behalf of any; but simply by way of stating a 
fact that needs to be explained. Of all forms of 
ecclesiastical controversy, the most sordid and mean 
is the form of mutual reproach, or blame for failure 
where there has been common guilt. The body that 
has helped to keep any class or any proportion of 
any class religious, deserves the gratitude of all the 
rest; the body that has failed, though it has tried to 
succeed, deserves at least their sympathy and re- 
spect. But when our churches stand face to face 
with the alienated classes of our great cities and in- 
dustries, the only mood that becomes any and is in- 
cumbent upon all, is one of humiliation and confes- 
sion of sin with a view to amendment of life. But 
this only emphasizes our special point — where the 
effect is so general there must be common causes 
more or less uniform in their operation. Our prob- 
lem is the discovery and the determination of these 
causes. 



CHAPTER III. 

CAUSESj APPAREXT AXD REAL, OF ALIENATION. 

1. Xow among these causes I do not reckon as 
primary, either in time or in importance, Avhat is 
popularly known as infidelity or unbelief. Xo doubt 
there is among artisans under various forms and 
names a great deal of vigorous and thoroughgoing 
negation. Forty years ago it used to be termed 
Secularism, which was a sort of instinctive and un- 
reasoned agnosticism. Its basis was a rough-and- 
ready doctrine of utility, which regarded this life as 
the only real object or field of knowledge, and judged 
everything by its value or efficiency in helping man 
to live it honestly and happily. Then, under the 
new scientific impulse, came a Avavc of more positive 
materialism^ and doctrines and dicta from men like 
Darwin and Huxley, down through Tyndall to Mole- 
schott and Bilchner, were repeated and interpreted 
into a sort of philosophy of existence, though now and 
then an ideal or intellectual element was so introduced 
as to modify the conception into a species of Pan- 
theism. The critcism which was its polemic against 
Christianity, especially so lar as directed against the 
Scriptures as sources or authorities in religion, was 



16 Belijlon in History. 

mainly antiquated, as it were a posthumous Deism. 
The remarkable thing is that the infidelity of the 
working man is essentially derivative, an acquired or 
borroAved thing; and the men from whom he has 
borrowed it were those of the eighteenth century, 
with their hard and prosaic spirit, their unhistorical 
sense, their inability to see anything in the historical 
records of the received religion, save the unreason or 
combined folly and hypocrisy of the present in pro- 
fessing to believe that such books could be of divine 
origin and authority. We may say, then, that this 
borrowed infidelity is an effect rather than a cause of 
the working man's estrangement from the churches; 
it is an apology for the attitude he holds, rather than 
the reason why he assumed the attitude. So far as 
careful inquiries and observation may be trusted, we 
may venture to affirm that the number of unbelievers 
to the whole class is proportionally small, though it 
contains some men of marked integrity and independ- 
ence of mind. Since, then, the intellectual reasons or 
difficulties must be held to be secondary causes of 
disbelief, we may find the primary in a moral convic- 
tion, the belief that the churches are not religious 
realities, not bodies organized for the teaching and 
doing of righteousness, but for the maintenance 
of vested interests and conventional respectabilities. 
There is disbelief in the churches rather than in 
religion, though, when the disbelief becomes articu- 
late, it tends to extend to the ideas and history in- 
volved in the claims and creeds of the churches. 

The distinction between disbelief in religion and 
in the churches may seem illicit, but is, in fact, both 



Causes^ Apparent and Realj of Alienation. 11 

radical aiid real. The one may be said to be in- 
tellectual, but the other social or moral and emo- 
tional in its origin; the one comes to a man through 
education, but the other through the experiences of 
life. Disbelief in religion may be conjoined with con- 
formity to a church: disbelief in the churches involves 
the refusal to be identified with their religion, or to 
join in their profession and worship. The former is 
a state of things not unknown in the upper and 
educated classes; the latter is more congenial to 
the franker and less illumined intellect of the work- 
man. The cultured man lives in a world of deli- 
cate shades and fine gradations; doubt may come 
through a hundred channels, till the strenuous faith of 
the past or the convinced present seems to him only 
a series of childlike illusions; but he may so feel the 
inconvenience both for himself and others of disturb- 
ing the established order that he will prefer to act as 
if what he knew to be illusions he believed to be 
realities. The workman, on the other hand, lives in 
a world of well-marked lines and clear-cut realities; 
his thinking has always the merit of directness and 
simplicity, while his logic works Avith the rigour 
of his own machines, and so if he comes to the 
conclusion that certain things are illusory or unreal, 
he finds it most convenient to act in harmony with 
the conclusion to which he has come. Hence the 
man of culture may be a speculative agnostic or 
philosophic sceptic, or even in things critical and 
historical, a rationalist, but at the same time, for 
reasons that weigh with his conventional conscience, 
a conforming churchman and even an ecclesiastical 



18 Religion in History, 

conservative. But this attitude is simply unintelligi- 
ble to the unsophisticated mind of the artisan^ and so 
to assume it is impossible to him; he simply cannot 
understand how it can be an honest thing to join in 
professions you have ceased to believe^ or spare 
institutions whose central ideas you conceive to be 
imaginary or false. The two unbeliefs are thus 
generically unlike; the one is the unbelief of a man 
whose mind has outgrown the faith of a world with 
Avhose social order he is satisfied, and Avishes to 
maintain; the other is the unbelief of a man who is 
dissatisfied with the social order in wliich he finds 
himself, and so comes to doubt the ideas which are 
invoked as its sanction and basis. The former 
infidelity is the child of the intellect, but the latter 
of experience; the one cultivates a doubt which 
allows or even requires him to support the church, 
but the other faces a church which he so conceives 
as to be compelled to doubt. In the one position 
there is fatal insincerity, in the other vigorous ve- 
racity; and the church which knew its opportunity and 
mission would hope more from the mind that denied 
and opposed than from the mind that doubted and 
conformed. 

2. We have been concerned here simply with the 
analysis of phenomena that are familiar to every one 
who knows and has observed both the educated and 
the working classes. And this analysis has illustrated 
the position that the infidelity of the latter is an 
effect rather than a cause of the alienation from the 
churches, while it helps to explain the derivative 
character of the ars-uments used to defend and 



Causes^ Apparent and Real, of Alienation, 19 

maintain it. But this only ttirows us back on the 
prior question as to the causes of this alienation. 
And here two things have to be observed: first^ these 
causes are not of yesterdaVj but are old^ have been 
almost imperceptible in growth, and gradual j'et 
continuous in their action; and secondly, they have 
not been incidental or occasional, but belong to the 
complex process which has produced our present 
social order. The function of the Church is not simply 
to maintain an established Christianity, but to create 
it anew" in the spirit and conscience of each successive 
generation. We use very general, and, it may be, 
altogether misleading terms when we speak of the 
present as being the heir of the past. The heir, in 
order to possess, must recreate or reconstitute his 
inheritance, assimilate it in form of being and mode 
of action to himself and his world. Tlie remarkable 
thing in the law of lieredity, Avhether individual or 
collective, is not what man does, but what he does 
7iot^ inherit. The son may repeat his father's features, 
colour, voice, gait, and even his minuter tricks or 
nicotic s of manner, but yet be, as regards mind, char- 
acter, faith, his exact opposite, i.e. he inherits the 
accidents or outward semblance, not the intrinsic 
qualities or distinctive characteristics. And this 
means that the new individual constitutes, in a 
perfectly real sense, out of himself and from among 
the old conditions a new world. And the same 
principle governs the evolution of society, though, 
as it works here on so vast a scale, the succession 
is less rapid, the changes more grndual, the contrasts 
not so violent. It is no mere fancy of the philo- 



20 Religion in History. 

sophical historian that each century has a character 
of its own; it is by what is distinctive in the 
character of each that the progress of the world is 
measured. 

Now, it is in conformity with this law that we say 
that each generation must have a Christianity of its 
own born anew within it, and not simply repeating 
the traditions or appropriating the habits of the 
fathers. IN'o single generation has ever been com- 
pletely Christianized, and even the most Christian of 
all the past generations, whether primitive or medi- 
aeval, would, were it re-incorporated and judged by 
our more exacting modern standards, be considered 
hardly Christian at all. The simpler a society is, 
the simpler will its religion be; the more complex 
the society, the richer in all its elements and the 
stronger in all its forces must the religion become, 
especially if it has to satisfy the whole nature, 
command and inspire the' whole of life. Now, the 
social evolution has with us been vaster and more 
rapid than the religious or ecclesiastical. Society 
has changed as the Church has not; it falsifies its 
living past by attempting to retain in a new world 
the organization, methods, ideals that were made 
in an old, and were excellently adapted to the world 
in which they were made, and to a vigorous life 
within it. Adaptation to environment is a necessity 
to all organisms; it is only by variation of form that 
continuity of life can be secured. Where the 
Roman Church has been most successful in main- 
taining her ancient ascendency in the ancient form, 
she has either annihilated progress, i.e. stopped the 



Causes, Axyparent and Real, of Alienation. 21 

evolution of a higher order in society, as in Spain, 
or she has helped to reduce it to a niedigeval tur- 
bulence, as in the South American Republics. But 
in Protestant countries the social development has 
outrun the religious, and it will only be by the re- 
ligious development overtaking the social that the 
Church will be able to reclaim the masses. 

This, then, is the general position: the alienation 
of the industrial classes from the Church is a result 
of this process of uneven or unequal development, 
or of the successive stages by which the Church 
has lost adaptation to the environment within which 
it lives. But what this means will become evident 
only when we have considered the stages or forms of 
this process in detail. 



CHAPTER IV. 

INFLUENCE OF THE POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT. 

We begin with the action of our modern political 
thought and history on the mind and feelings of the 
classes which here concern us. Of this immense 
subject only a few salient points can be touched. 

1. At the outset two things must be noted — first 
political and religious thought are so organically 
related, that each is but a form of the other. Politi- 
cal thought is the religious idea applied to the State, 
and the conduct of its public affairs, while religious 
thought is but our view of the polity of the universe, 
and man's relation to it. It follows that as man 
thinks in the one field, he comes to think also in the 
other; the unconscious logic which develops our 
instincts or intuitions into judgments is often much 
more rigorous than the conscious reasoning which 
builds up our intellectual system of things. And 
it is by force of this unconscious logic that the 
classes who reason because they feel, bring their 
political and religious ideas into harmony. And 
secondly, we live in the first century since the 
foundation of the world in which these classes have 



Influence of the Political Developmoit. 23 

bj a process of gradual and ordered change been, 
as it were, emancipated, become, even as those who 
were erst their superiors, possessed of political power. 
The promise of the first Christian preachers Chris- 
tian states are only now beginning to trjf to fulfil; and 
though this result has been achieved through the 
action of Christian ideas, yet it has not seldom been in 
the face of the now active and now passive resistance 
of Christian societies, or their official representatives. 
In the Middle Ages, the political and the ec- 
clesiastical systems were strictly supplementary and 
harmonious; the one was feudal, the other papal, and 
both within their limits and after their kind patriar- 
chal. The King was head of the State, and all with- 
in it held under him; the Pope was head of the Church, 
and all within it held under him. Each in his own 
order reigned by divine right, though attempts were 
made to limit the power of the one by charters and by 
parliaments, and the authority of the other by creeds 
and councils. But the qualifying force Avas lodged 
in the one case in the barons and burghers, in the 
other in the bishops and clergy; as regards both 
the multitude Avas dumb, made to be ruled and to obey, 
not to reason and advise. The civil and ecclesiasti- 
cal potentates might reason and negotiate and differ 
concerning their respective authorities or pro- 
vinces, but in these high affairs the people had no 
voice; they had to suffer the ban or the blessing, as 
the one or the other of the rival authorities decreed. 
The Saxon serf in some respects hardly differed from 
the Roman slave, and though the English burgher 
and yeoman conquered his freedom, the peasant re- 



24 Religion in History, 

mained the son of the bondwoman, without a voice 
in the assembly of his people. 

In consequence of the change of religion the old 
factors of order in En^^'ind were new combined, the 
forces from beneath were not relieved and called into 
play. The King could without fear of the Pope affirm 
his divine right, and he so did it ac to compel the 
barons and the burghers and the yeomen to qualify 
his rights by theirs. They, after a century of struggle, 
triumphed, and after the kings by divine right came 
a line which reigned by the grace of the aristocracy 
and gentry. The rights that know governed were 
those of property, and they proved even more merci- 
less to the peasant and the workman than the 
feudal overlord or the autocratic king. They did not 
assert themselves by means of vassalage or villen- 
age or arbitrary exactions, but mainly by the slow 
growth of claims which devoured ancient privileges, 
and of new laws which abolished old liberties and 
rights. And under this reign the people were help- 
less, almost as dumb as they had been in the old feudal 
days. But change was at hand; the idea of free 
speech penetrated dowmwards, and with it a new 
order of rights began to be conceived. There are 
writers who can cleverly demonstrate the logical ab- 
surdities that lie in such phrases as ^ ^ the rights of 
man," and by analysis eliminate the idea of rights 
from any conception of him that can be formed. 
But all phrases are relative, and have some histori- 
cal occasion which must be known if they are to be 
understood. ^ ^ The rights of man " is a phrase which 
must be construed as the antithesis to the rights of 



Influence of the Political Development 25 

special or favoured classes, kings or priests or peers. 
It denotes the idea which Knox expressed in his fine 
reply to Queen Mary: ^' And what are you in this 
commonwealth? " ^ ^ A subject born within the same, 
Madam; " and because a subject with a place as real 
and rights as valid and claims to consideration as 
sacred as those of the sovereign. Once this idea had 
penetrated the mind of the multitude, the hour of 
deliverance from the narrower and more violent 
rights, regal, clerical, baronial, vras at hand. 

2. But the new ideas had to struggle hard first 
for a footing, then for victory; and the conflict was 
carried on not without sweat and dust. The estab- 
lished political and ecclesiastical order had been, as it 
were, woven in the loom of time into a single web, 
and to unweave the web seemed like undoing the 
chief work of time, dissolving society into chaos. 
On the one side, men defended the political order 
that they might save the ecclesiastical; on the other 
side, men assailed the ecclesiastical, which was 
the more vulnerable, that they might reach the 
political. The supreme calamity of French Catholi- 
cism, or rather the crime which no later sufi'erings 
can ever atone for, was its alliance with the king and 
the Court. The king had been a convenient instru- 
ment in the religious wars; by his help Protestantism 
was practically annihilated, and it was thought that 
since he was so good for one thing, he could be made 
equally good for all. As his will was sovereign, to 
control him was to control France. And so the 
great concern of Catholicism was to keep possession 
of the king, Avhich it did without being too curious as 



26 Religion in History. 

to the kind and quality of the king possessed. But in 
being so careful of him it lost the people^ and put into 
the hands of his enemies, Avho were therefore also the 
enemies of his church, the most tremendous weapon 
that was ever levelled against religion. For in their 
fury the assailants did not distinguish religion from 
the men who betrayed it, and Christianity was made 
to bear and to suffer for the sins of Catholicism. And it 
did suffer. There never was a raillery like Voltaire's, 
a mockery so pitiless, so charged with scorn, so heated 
through and through with passion, yet so perfectly 
controlled and adapted to its end. While he incar- 
nated, he did not exhaust the spirit of revolt; he only 
inaugurated its reign. The Encyclopedists opposed 
the illumination to superstition; Rousseau the state 
of nature to the state of custom and convention and 
fictitious inequality. And so the conflict spread from 
religion and the Catholicism which was held to be its 
only real and adequate embodiment, to society and the 
State. The denial passed through the church to the 
king it had crowned with divine rights and declared to 
be most Christian; it was seen that he had neglected 
his duties to the lives, as much as the church had 
neglected its duty to the minds of men. And so the 
movement which began with the Christ of the Roman 
Church as '^the Infamous" it was to erase, ended 
in the erasure of the monarch. The two that had 
stood together that they might abolish the Protest- 
antism of the seventeenth century, fell together in 
the consequent revolution of the eighteenth. 

3. But France largely determined the spirit and 
form of our modern political thought, and helped to 



Influence of the Political Development, 27 

give it, especially so far as the people are concerned, 
so much the character of a religious revolt. The 
books which had at the end of last century, and 
throughout the first half of this, by far the greatest 
influence on the awakening mind of the P]nglish 
artisan. The Age of Reason and TJie Bights of Man , 
were steeped in the spirit of France and the Revolu- 
tion. IS'o doubt they found here friendly conditions. 
The Established Church was torpid, and a guardian 
of obnoxious interests rather than a teacher of 
neglected duties. The middle classes were in the 
hands of the old dissent, the peasantry were being 
reached by the new Methodism; but for the artisan 
no one seemed specially to care. His food was a 
radical philosophy, a popularized version of the Ency- 
clopedic; he lived in the age of reason, and believed 
in the charter and the rights of man. There is a 
remarkable difference at this period in the respective 
attitudes of the middle and the working classes to 
politics and religion. The middle classes were essen- 
tially religious, Tom Paine was a name they abhorred; 
but they were vigorous reformers, anxious to repeal 
disabilities, to simplify and ameliorate law, to facili- 
tate the creation and distribution of wealth, to hus- 
band the national resources, and to use them in the 
most economical, yet profitable and productive way. 
They had great respect for property, and no theory as 
to the abstract or innate rights of man as man which 
they thirsted to apply to politics in general, and the 
suffrage in particular. But the working classes were 
more rigorously philosophical; they were governed 
by ideals which they had reasoned out and applied 



28 Religion in History, 

to the organization of the State; a man, simply be- 
cause he was a man, was sacred in their eyes, and 
possessed of rights which were proper to himself, and 
did not depend on any property, great or small, 
he might hold. On this ground they pleaded for 
political justice, and the changes it required were 
matters of right, not of mere expediency, which, 
indeed, was to them a peculiarly abhorrent concep- 
tion. But to this political philosophy the Church 
was a greater offence than the State; it was the 
apotheosis of inequalities, loved rank and wealth, 
privilege and prescription, forgot the poverty of its 
founders, who had laboured with their hands, and of 
all the beatitudes most believed the one the Master 
had neglected to utter, Beati possidentes. With the 
Anglican Church, then, they felt that as now con- 
stituted they could have no part or lot. As Estab- 
lished it was the creation of privilege, as Episcopal 
it embodied to them the hated aristocratic principle, 
as administered, it regarded the people as children or 
paupers, and not as reasonable and independent men. 
As to the Free Churches, those of the older dissent 
were too plutocratic, too much governed by class 
feeling — an interested society, whose heart was where 
its interests were, with the employers and the trades- 
men; while those of the later dissent were too emo- 
tional, too little intellectual, so concerned with the 
future as to forget the present. So they reasoned, 
and they acted as they reasoned; stood aloof from 
the churches, criticized them, disliked them, doubted 
their reality, denied their sincerity, and became 
sceptical of all they believed. 



Influence of the Political Development, 29 

4. So far we have been strictly historical and 
expository, but now it is time to confess that the 
churches had in them more than enough, to justify 
this attitude. Since then they have changed in 
many ways for the better, but they must be prepared 
to change still more if they would win back what 
they have lost. For one thing, it is impossible to 
maintain an aristocratic church in a democratic state, 
save, indeed, as tlie church of the aristocracy, their 
dependents and imitators. Such a church is easy 
to maintain, at least so long as the aristocracy are 
able and willing to maintain it; yet its maintenance 
is, as regards national religion, a thing of infinite 
insignificance. We need the same sort of harmony 
between the ideas of Church and State in the modern 
as there was in the mediasval mind. Only in a 
feudal state can a papal church be in place, and a 
church which contradicts the whole spirit and genius 
of democracy may within a free state be the church 
of a class, but can never be the home of the collective 
people. The principles that regulate their political 
will regulate their ecclesiastical thinking; in a State 
^' broad based upon the people's will," the only 
church that has any chance of continuance must be 
one whose polity has the same basis, and the will 
that is the basis must be the main factor of order 
and organization. Of course, a church may argue 
that its polity was a matter of revelation, that its 
order Avas given to it, that its orders have been his- 
torically maintained, and are of its very essence. 
But these are to the people mere theories; about 
them scholars may like to argue — for they are per- 



30 Religion in History, 

sons who dearly love discussions about points where 
conjecture has free scope and positive proof is im- 
possible; but for men of thought or action such 
theories have no worth. Yet, however this may be, 
one thing is clear, the will that has become an 
efficient factor in the State will never be content 
with a Church which simply reduces it into a mere 
receptivity or political inefficient. And the people 
are even more within their rights in claiming an 
active place in the conduct and legislation of the 
Church than in those of the State. They are but 
returning to the original idea and practice. The 
early churches were real democracies; their citizens 
had all the privileges of the fully enfranchized; and 
the constituents of the modern ought to have the 
place and the privileges of those of the ancient 
churches. But, of course, the cardinal principle of 
the ancient Church must be maintained in the mod- 
ern; its people must be the people of God, for what 
other sheep can be of this fold? On this matter the 
democratic feeling is altogether sound; it loves real- 
ity, dislikes sham, pretence, and make-believe. It 
does not wish to see a man who has no religion busy 
himself with religious concerns; it does wish to see 
a man who professes religion be and do as he pro- 
fesses. And if the Church be organized and admin- 
istered by the really religious, and look jealously to 
the character of those who compose it, then cer- 
tainly the English workman will be the first to give 
it the homage of that respect which is the earliest 
and simplest form of faith. 



CHAPTER y. 

INFLUENCE OF SOCIETY AND THE SOCIAL SPIRix. 

1. But there are social tendencies and a social 
temper which are even more divisive in their action 
than political thought and feeling. These seem to 
be increasing in strength rather than decreasing. 
The more highly specialized our industrial life be- 
comes, the more divided our society appears to 
grow. The plutocracy is ever pressing on the heels 
of the aristocracy, and with the small pride but 
great vanity that seeks to forget the rock whence it 
w^as hewn, it deepens, in the very degree that it suc- 
ceeds, the line that divides the upper from the lower 
classes. Masters and workmen are every year grow- 
ing farther apart, becoming rivals that with fear and 
distrust jealously watch and willingly outwit each 
other. The old personal relations between them are 
being lost. Limited liability companies are em- 
ployers, but not masters, and directors feel respon- 
sibility to shareholders a more immediate and exact- 
ing thing than concern for their men. Associations 
and unions, too, tend to place their relations on a 
strictly impersonal and financial basis. The master 
will not act without the approval of his association, 



32 Beligion in History, 

or the workman without the sanction of his union, 
and they negotiate through otficials and in pursu- 
ance of a policy rather than as men. Then the new 
social hunger affects both. The unions differentiate 
the workmen. The skilled and unskilled are divided 
by a gulf oyer which intelligence of each other's 
wellbeing can hardly pass. The finest gradations 
of feeling and social sense distinguish the various 
crafts, and within what seems the same craft status 
is determined by the quality and rarity of the skill. 
And why should not an aristocracy of art be known 
to workmen as well as to artists? why may social 
distinction, based on the kind and degree of skill 
required, be allowed to professions and denied to 
handicrafts? Still, if the unions differentiate the 
craftsmen they unite the workers, but the social 
joins with the industrial tendency in making the di- 
vision from the employer absolute. The master does 
not love to live among his men; he prefers the so- 
ciety of his suburb; most of all, where he can com- 
mand it, a town house where he and his womankind 
can see society and enjoy the gaieties of the season. 
This is a feature ominous of serious social change. 
The old Lancasliire and Yorkshire manufacturer 
was a man of shrewd mind, but simple tastes. He 
lived quite plainly, and he worked hard. And 
though he and his work-people had many a tussle, 
ending now and then in a violence and destruction 
quite unknown in these days, yet they knew each 
other, understood each other, and learned through 
their common life and toil to cultivate a sort of 
genial brotherhood, B\it the head of a great firm 




Influence of Society and the Social Spirit 33 

is mostly invisible; he is a name to his people, and 
nothing more; his people are to him part of his ma- 
chinery, distinguished from the other parts by being 
less manageable, and when deranged more difficult 
to repair. And so they te nd to fall e yeji farther 
apart, to influence each otl^^le^s^ tq j^^^^ess jii^st to 
each other, to care for nc 
got from the labour thj 
other to buy. 

2. Now the churched 
follow the path of increa^^^^^(!!¥SP'si%c^^ 
which is the line of least resisteiiiUtf, Uhd Lu grow into 
societies for the demarcation and consecration of 
class. And the more they have done so, the more 
distasteful they have become to working men. There 
is nothing they so abhor as the social distinction 
which claims a religious sanction and assumes a 
religious shape; it wounds them in the most 
sensitive part. They cannot believe in a God who 
regards a man as any the better for the accident of 
his birth, or of superior dignity because of his rank, 
and they will not respect a society which claims to 
represent God on the earth, and yet puts its trust in 
the House of Lords, or boasts of its aristocratic con- 
nections, or leans for support on some plutocrat who 
is loudly generous without being plainly just. Nor 
are they any more enamoured of churches composed 
altogether of people of their own class, for this is 
only another sort of insult to their sensitive pride. 
And this pride expresses a true feeling, the feeling 
that as all men are equal before God, so in His church 
there ought to be no respect of persons, — saintliness 



84 Religion in History, 

alone being recognized as honourable and dis- 
tinguished. And this feeling may be, and ought to 
be, as much outraged by the workman who will not 
for social reasons worship with his master, as by the 
master who will not for similar reasons worship with 
his workman. If wealth were wise, there is nothing 
it would more dread than the separation of classes in 
the house of God, or the separation of different houses 
of God to different classes; and if it were good as 
well as wise there is nothing it would so little allow. 
The master who goes to worship where only other 
masters are, does his best to alienate himself from 
his people, to lower religion in their eyes, and to 
bring on the social revolution; for the only salt that 
can preserve society is sympathy and communion in 
the most serious things of the spirit between all 
classes. And this means that into the Church the 
sense and the air of social superiority must not be 
allowed to come. The attitude of patronage or 
condescension is here entirely out of place and purely 
mischievous; for in matters of religion the cottage 
may be more able to play the Lady Bountiful to the 
hall, than the hall to the cottage. And the Church, 
if it is wise, will prefer a workman qualified to 
serve to even a qualified master; for while society is 
always ready to honour position, it ought to be the 
distinction and privilege of the Church jealously both 
to see and to show that it honours spiritual fitness, 
and not rank or social status. And if master and 
workman are associated on equal terms in church 
affairs, they will attain the mutual knowledge and 
develop the mutual respect that will make intercourse 



Influence of Society and the Social Spirit. 35 

on other things more pleasant and reasonable. If the 
Church could secure this service according to spiritual 
gifts, it would do more for social order and stability 
than any possible legislation. 

This is written in a Scotch manse, and under the 
influence of the memories it awakens. Here pres- 
bytery has been an extraordinary power; of the re- 
ligious people of Scotland ninety per cent, are within 
its fold, and its power has been largely due to its 
parity, the way in which it has enlisted men of all 
classes in the service of the Church. It was within 
my recollection no unusual thing to see as members 
of the same session, all duly ordained elders charged 
with the spiritual oversight of the congregation, the 
laird, the school-master, the doctor, the farmer, the 
farm servant, or shepherd; and of these I have known 
the last to be the man of finest character, of most 
wisdom in council and greatest spiritual weight in 
the congregation or parish. Indeed, as a fact, from 
the experience of one who was himself for several 
happy years the moderator of a kirk-session, this 
ought to be told — that the person who above all 
others stands out in his memory as a man of delicate 
feeling, of clear, yet charitable judgment, was a 
working quarryman. And the presence of such a 
man in a high ministerial office, elected and ordained 
to it by the act and sanction of the Church, was a 
good to all concerned. The laird, the school-master, 
the doctor, and the farmer could not but respect the 
hind or the shepherd whose words were often wiser 
than their own, and in him they respected his whole 
class. It, too, was dignified by the office he filled so 



36 Religion in History, 

worthily, and the words of reproof he had to speak 
at the cottage hearth, or of consolation at some 
humble death-bed, were tempered by a feeling of kin- 
ship, even when the sense of spiritual vocation most 
burdened his spirit. Again must I express the sober 
and deep conviction — the church that dares to associ- 
ate its poor with its rich in the same service when 
both are alike qualified for it, is the only church en- 
titled to command, or worthy to receive the obedience 
and the love of both. 



CHAPTER YI. 

INFLUENCE OF THE INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT. 

1„ But beside the political and social tendencies 
we must place the industrial. The harder the struggle 
for existence grows, the harder does it become to be 
religious. If the wolf is not only at the door, but 
has to be held out by sheer strength of muscle, we 
can scarcely expect the man who holds it to think 
of other, even though they be higher things. In 
order to worship there must be not only a day of 
rest for the man, but a rested man for the day. If 
its hours are mostly needed to sleep off the fatigue 
or lassitude of the week, it can be little used for 
worship. And if the only religious exercise of the 
week be on the Sunday, the exercise will soon grow 
burdensome and irritating. Now the conditions 
under which work is done are increasingly unfavour- 
able to the cultivation of the religious spirit. Com- 
petition grows every year keener, the weaker men are 
pushed downward, the abler men find it harder to rise, 
or even to make a beginning, and where time is so 
imperious in its claims, little thought can be spared 
for eternity. Possibly the matter may be put most 
closely by the statement of an actual but most typical 



38 Religion in History, 

case — that of a Yorkshire village, which would be a 
goodly western town. It was once a great evangelical 
centre, had quite an army of home missionaries, 
and created congregations and schools in towns much 
more important but less religious than itself. Its 
industry was weaving, which it cultivated with old- 
fashioned leisure. The men wove in their own 
houses or sheds, regulated their own hours, and were 
never too busy to discuss a question in politics or a 
problem in theology. They had time after breakfast 
for morning prayers, and in the evening the family as- 
sembled for worship. It was the proud boast of the 
village that at least once every day the sound of psalm 
and of prayer could be heard in its houses. But steam 
came, and the power-loom and the great factory, with 
^^ Hands " whose hours and work were as rigorously 
regulated as the looms they tended. The old leisure, 
with the old home life it allowed, was no more. 
Breakfast became a hurried meal, time enough to 
eat, but time for nothing more; the men and women 
who came home in the evening were tired, so ex- 
hausted with the heated atmosphere that they craved 
the open air, with a sound in the ears that made the 
old animated talk an irritation. So the old habits 
were broken off, and new and less excellent habits 
formed. The women in the mill lost their domestic 
feeling, and became noisier, coarser, more masculine, 
liking the factory as freedom, hating the home as 
drudgery. And the men lost their old quieter and 
more intellectual interests, grew fond of excitement, 
of amusements noisier than the noisy looms. And 
so the passion was awakened for the athletics that 



Influence of the Industrial Development. 39 

supplied opportunities to drink and gamble^ and the 
more it developed the more averse they became to 
the old religious life^ indeed incompetent for it in 
its old staid simplicity. May we not say, then, that 
this industrial development has created conditions 
that have made religion indefinitely harder to the 
man who must keep pace with it in order to live? 

2. But it is easier to see these evils than to discover 
a remedy which the churches can supply. The evils 
are consequents inseparable from the conditions under 
which our industries have been developed, rather than 
from the development itself, and the remedy must 
come, not from arresting the development, but chang- 
ing the conditions. Whatever makes the struggle for 
life not less strenuous or inevitable, but less mechani- 
cal and monotonous, will conduce to a happier spirit 
in the workman. It is not the work that kills 
idealism, but the sordid conditions within and with- 
out the worker. And of these the inner are the 
fontal; and so the first thing to be done is to en- 
rich and ennoble his soul, beget in him purer tastes, 
and evoke higher capacities. This is a thing that 
ought to be considered from the very beginning 
of his intelligent being, attempted in our schools, 
and incorporated in our systems of education. The 
school ought to be made as bright and beautiful as 
possible, the imagination ought to be cultivated as 
well as the understanding, and artistic faculty made 
as real an end as technical skill. If taste or the in- 
tellect could be so developed that to satisfy it became 
as instinctive and imperious a need in the workman 
as in the cultivated lawyer, or doctor, or statesman, — 



40 Eeligion in History, 

and these are certainly often more cruelly overworked 
than he — then he would even as they pluck from the 
very heart of his toil the moments needed for the 
refreshment of his mind or the culture of his spirit. 
Then, there ought to be accessible to him places 
where he could cultivate the tastes which had been 
developed within. The bath has been a great refin- 
ing agency, for physical is near of kin to spiritual 
cleanliness; but these both can flourish only where 
the means for their being can be found, and the 
churches ought to be as jealous about the condi- 
tions necessary to intellectual and spiritual health as 
our public authorities are about those needful for the 
physical. Museums, picture galleries, and palaces 
of delight may, without a prepared people, be worse 
than useless; indeed, only haunts for the idle; but 
to a people prepared they may be made high means 
of grace. 

These two things, then, the churches ought to do 
their best to create and to cultivate, the faculties 
that need intellectual and spiritual exercise for their 
very being, and the opportunities and means for 
keeping them in exercise. For the more these be- 
come necessaries to a man, the more open will he be 
to religious and moral influences. But these things 
must not stand alone; recreation and amusement are 
growing necessities to our industrial population, and 
there are no agencies more able to refine or brutalize. 
And for the moment the brutalizing force seems the 
stronger. Gambling threatens to be the ruin of all 
manly sport, while the passions it evokes and the 
drinking it encourages are making great matches 



Influence of the Industrial Development. 41 

more a terror to decency than a recreation to weari- 
ness. To refine our amusements would be a most 
religious work, and one that religious societies 
might verj^ well undertake, even with some hope of 
success. Yet they would need to begin above rather 
than below; it is precisely in the point of amuse- 
ments that the upper classes act most mischievously 
on the lower, and provoke the imitation that is here 
worst flattery. If the church could persuade our 
gilded youth so to improve their pleasures as to re- 
form their manners, it would help to make the amuse- 
ments of all classes purer and healthier. But the 
most needful thing of all is the recreation of the home, 
for in industrial England it has almost ceased to be. 
Increased domesticity means the increase of all the 
finer affections, the rise of all the more gracious 
cares, and hopes, and loves. And where these are, 
religion is never far away; and where they are not, 
it will only be an external and, as it were, manufac- 
tured thing. It seems, therefore, as if the recovery 
of the home were the final necessity of the situation. 
If only the church could rebuild the home, it would 
create the conditions that would, even in the face of 
our modern industrial development, make all the old 
chivalries and graces of religion still possible. 



CHAPTER YII. 

INFLUENCE OF THE INTELLECTUAL MOVEMENT. 

1. But alongside the industrial development we 
must place the intellectual. The last half-century 
has been a period of remarkable mental activity and 
change — certainly much greater among the working 
than among the leisured and professional classes. 
In this period the penny morning and the halfpenny 
evening newspaper have been created, and has ceased 
to be a mere news-sheet or political organ, and 
become a medium for all sorts of intelligence — 
sporting and scientific, social and literary. The 
newspaper has become, as it were, a circulating 
national library containing all kinds of stuff, good, 
bad, and indifferent, always appetizing, though not 
always wholesome and refreshing. In the old 
Chartist days newspapers were few, but they were 
filled with a serious purpose, serious men read them, 
passed them from hand to hand, and seriously dis- 
cussed their contents. Now, though many journals 
are high-toned, not a few are edited on the principle 
that they must please to live, and the pleasure they 
conceive is of no noble or generous order. There 
are society papers for the working as for the upper 



Influence of the Intellectual 3Iovement 43 

classes, and each is spiced with the sauce its 
readers most relish. Sensations are loved below 
as well as above, but their flavour depends not on 
mystery or innuendo, but on blunt brutality. The 
records of the police courts are racy reading, but 
still racier the filthy gossip of backstairs and 
sporting-house and club. The sins of the west 
end are Vv^ell known in the east, the achievements 
of every noble lord who has distinguished himself 
in the divorce court or a gambling hell are written 
out in full; and where the follies and crimes of the 
aristocracy are concerned the democracy has a good 
memory. These things are read by many because 
unclean, but by others because they speak of judg- 
ment to come. And this element has a subtle 
way of penetrating even the graver thought and 
argument of the people. I shall never forget the 
loathing which was awakened by the gruesome and 
sensual suggestions, touching certain sacred persons 
and histories, made by what professed to be an 
organ of advanced thought. It was the severest shock 
my faith in the intellectual character of the free- 
thinking workman ever received. But it was signi- 
ficant of the mental atmosphere created by the 
society newspaper wherever it circulates, whether 
among the upper ten thousand or the lower twenty 
millions. 

Yet this is a digression on intellectual deteriora- 
tion rather than development. Let us hope that 
these things represent only a muddy eddy in the 
main onward moviug and clarifying stream; and 
then mark the signs of mental expansion and 



44 Religion in History, 

activity. The industrial classes have proved them- 
selves to possess political capacity in a high degree. 
They have had statesmen and legislators of their 
own raising; their unions have exhibited as much 
organizing and administrative genius as could be 
found in any modern government. They are in- 
deed^ whatever view we may take of their means 
and action, a marvellous creation, accomplished in 
spite of innumerable difllculties, both internal and 
external. And this capacity is beginning to con- 
cern itself with the State. The old Chartist was 
primarily a politician; he was concerned about legis- 
lation and government, he wanted to be a citizen 
and to have the State so constituted that there 
would be room and a function in it for him; but 
the modern trades-unionist is primarily an econ- 
omist, concerned about labour and its rights — how 
to sell it to the best advantage, and how to main- 
tain its price even in a falling market. Yet, as 
the Chartist saw lying behind his politics the field 
of economics, so the Unionist looks through his 
economics at politics, not, indeed, as an end, but 
as a means: in other words, he comes to parliament 
through the union, and all legislation is but a vehicle 
for its economical action. But what concerns us 
here is the mental and moral discipline involved 
in the organization and administration of the unions, 
and so the kind and quality of the men now being 
formed within labour, both for its sectional direction 
and its place in national politics. They are within 
their own order distinctly statesmen and legisla- 
tors, and their class must be measured by its 



Influence of the Intellectual Movement 45 

highest and strongest members, not by its lowest 
and feeblest. 

Then, education has extended, and still extends 
and improves; the school is now common, and the 
School Board is a body with higher aims than the 
statesmen who created it ever dreamed of. The 
people are not so easily satisfied as their representa- 
tives, they want higher and more efficient instruction, 
and the more they control the board the more they 
get what they want. And so to the primary has 
been added the higher Board school, and to both the 
technical and the continuation school. And as the 
ability to read is created, so is the opportunity for 
its exercise. Free libraries and reading-rooms now 
exist in all our cities and considerable towns, their 
number still increases, and as fast as it increases the 
space is occupied and the demand rises for more. 
And there, through novel and history, through science 
and biography, through philosophy and theology, 
through criticism and poetry, the people are being 
educated, and by their own will and at their own 
expense are carrying forward the work of the schools. 
And a special literature is growing up to meet their 
demand. For their enlightenment science ceases to 
be technical, and becomes so simple that he who reads 
may run, history is cultivated by masters of literary 
style, travels are made as fascinating as fiction, and 
fiction is as full of accurate knowledge as if it 
were science. Men who once knew no story but the 
Pilgrim's Progress now read Thackeray and Dickens, 
Walter Scott and George Eliot; or those whose only 
history book was the Old Testament, now read 



46 Religion in History. 

Carlyle and Froude, Gardiner and Lecky; or those 
whose only poetry was Watts' or Wesley's Hymns, 
now study Tennyson and Browning, Arthur Hugh 
Clough and Matthew Arnold. And they cannot 
read these things without getting a certain largeness 
of view or a critical attitude that makes them im- 
patient with everything that savours of a narrower 
and more unreasoning world. 

2. Now, has there been any correspondent change 
in what passes for religious education? On the con- 
trary, may we not say it stands where it did fifty 
years ago? Anything more fatuous than the policy 
of the religious communities on this matter it is 
hardly possible to conceive. They have been con- 
tented with their old standards, their old methods, 
their old agents. It is humiliating to think that the 
thing which the majority in the London School 
Board so fanatically fights for, is called religious 
education. The thing wanted is not to be got at 
the ordinary Board school or from the average Sun- 
day School teacher; the churches must give it, 
make it their constant charge, do it as their most 
vital work, devote to it their finest and best equipped 
spirits. What is called religious education is, to 
speak the blunt truth, often only a preparation for 
scepticism. It is appalling to think what would 
happen were the highest mysteries of the Christian 
faith made into subjects and standards for the 
ordinary Board school; even in the hands of a 
skilful and reverent teacher they would appear as 
a series of antinomies that grew ever more incredible 
and ever less capable of reconciliation. These are 



Influence of the Intellectual Movement 47 

things that only the most highly trained scholarly 
and philosophical intellect is qualified to teach, espe- 
cially to boys. We can already see how the method 
has operated, and with what fatal results, in a region 
far less open to abuse than the doctrinal. Crude views 
of Biblical history crudely presented to a boy of four- 
teen, and then confusedly remembered by him when he 
has become a man, may be said to be the material for 
the ideas as to religion and the Bible which are dis- 
cussed and destroyed by the sulphureous criticism of 
the secular hall and the free-thinking press. The an- 
swer to their infidelity is not argument but education, 
yet education of the church that gives it, as Well as of 
the men to whom it is given. It must be conducted 
in the school, but also in the home; must begin 
when the boy is a child, and not cease at the very 
moment when it is most needed, just as he is 
blossoming into the man, going out into the world 
and learning the gravity of work and the impotence 
of will. Yet in order to this the Church ought to 
be the school, for, to look at the matter under only 
a single aspect, the boy's relation to the school 
ends, and with it his education ceases, but his rela- 
tion to the Church ought to be continuous, and its 
care for him a thing as constant and progressive as 
its responsibility. And here the most courageous 
is also the wisest policy; religious knoAvledge in 
the school is fixed and formulated, but in the Church 
is living and growing, and so the two give things 
generically different. The school may drill, but the 
Church communicates life. And simply because it 
deals with living knowledge, it cannot be held in- 



48 Religion in History. 

bondage to standards and rigid formulae. And here 
it is of cardinal moment that the wider thought 
should not be held back from the 3'outh till he 
hears of it in the debating club or hall of science. 
He ought to be taken as far into the confidence 
of the scholar and the mind of the religious thinker 
as he is able to go; and as the mind grows, in- 
struction ought also to grow with the mind. And so 
far from being limited to the text and the catechetical 
formulae that are the hope of our Philistine School 
Board legislators, it ought to be made as many-sided 
and comprehensive as religion itself, sympathetic to 
poetry, akin to art, related to history, bound up with 
philosophy, embedded in science. If religion could 
only be so taught, then the whole education of our 
people would become a discipline in the knowledge 
whose end is piety and whose inspiration is God. 



CHAPTER YIII. 

THE CONCILIATION OF THE ALIENATED. 

Our argument, so far as it has proceeded, may 
be stated thus: The present state of the working 
classes may be described as one of alienation rather 
from the churches than from religion; but this aliena- 
tion has been due not to one but to many causes, 
which, as springing out of our whole modern de- 
velopment, have affected equally and radically both 
sides. The churches have of late manifested a 
changed feeling, are possessed of a new sense of 
their duty to end the alienation, but to this there is 
no reciprocal or correspondent feeling on the part 
of the working classes. As the estrangement has 
been gradual, the reconciliation must be the same, 
and it can only be accomplished by the Church 
as a whole reaching, and either neutralizing or 
removing all the causes of the alienation. This 
may involve large modifications in the polities and 
methods, and an enlargement in all the activities 
of our varied religious societies, but the Church 
cannot hope for exemption from the inexorable law 
that the organism that would survive in the struggle 
for existence must adapt itself to its environment. 



50 Religion in History, 

Grant these positions, and the problem follows: How 
is the Church not only to reach and remove the causes 
of alienation, but to reach and reconcile the alienated? 

1. Now, it is evident, the Church can do this only 
as an essential part of the mission with which it 
has been charged — the saving of man. Its strength 
does not lie in policies or economic stratagems, in 
ceremonial pomp or impressive spectacles; but in 
the truth it teaches, the life it communicates, and 
the character it forms. It may constitute a happy 
world out of good and happy persons, but it could 
never create an ordered society out of the most feli- 
citous speculations, political, economical, or the- 
ological. 

The first thing, then, for the Church to be is to 
be faithful to its own mission and ideal, to live and 
think and act as if it were indeed the Saviour of men. 
It exists, like its Founder and Head, not to be 
ministered unto, but to minister, and to give its life 
a ransom for the many. It ought to know neither 
aristocracy nor democracy, but only man; its concern 
is neither with capital nor labour, but with the men 
who hold the capitalor do the labour. Its work is 
to save souls, to teach truth, to enforce duty and 
discipline, in a word, so to cause the kingdom of God 
to come, that His will may be done on earth as in 
heaven. But this is the most radical work possible; 
it is deeper than politics, for it deals with the men 
who make and administer and obey the laws; it is 
more fundamental than economics, for it touches the 
sources and ends of wealth, the men who create and 
distribute, and who accumulate and apply it; it is 



The Conciliation of the Alienated. 51 

more determinative than society, for it judges the 
social units, limits yet guards their rights, and tries 
their conventions. But the faithfulness must be to 
the whole mission. It is not enough for the Church 
to conceive itself as an institute for worship or 
preaching or the observance of ritual, or as a society 
adorned by official dignities and constituted by the 
orders that govern; it is necessary that it be trans- 
muted by the fire of a great enthusiasm into the re- 
generator and moral guide of life. It must conceive 
itself as through and through ethical, as it were 
the embodied conscience and law of God, created 
expressly for the moral direction and inspiration of 
man. It ought to contend for purity of belief in order 
to purity of character, and to hold sin the one heresy 
that makes a man excommunicate. It must not 
mistake conformity to custom for obedience to moral 
law, or be so false in its standards as to allow a bad 
man to be a patron of its clergy or of their livings, 
while denying to a good man who serves Christ 
in his own way the name of Christian. Nor must 
it wink at sin in liigh places or in low, or allow its 
discipline to become a dead letter. And discipline 
is worse than a dead letter when it is so misguided 
as to condemn in a peasant wliat it fails to see in a 
peer, however flagrantly flaunted before its eyes, or 
when it spares the mystery of iniquity lying at its 
own door while angrily reproachful where the door 
chances to be a neighbour's. Discipline would be a 
tremendous power were it vigorously and righteously 
exercised; where the law could not reach it would 
penetrate, the manifest sin that is more mischievous 



52 Religion in History, 

than open crime it would punish, and its penalties 
would follow the immoralities whose guilt is real, 
though, perhaps, not legal. And not till the 
Church be fearless in its discipline, will it seem 
honest to those outside it; but were it to prove 
its faith by enforcing its discipline, it would reclaim 
the masses by compelling them into admiration and 
belief. 

The Church, then, will be strong only as it is just, 
and it will be just as it deals with men as men, and 
not simply as grouped into classes. It is as impossible 
to draw up an indictment against a class as against 
a whole people, and where an indictment cannot be 
drawn, a sentence cannot be passed. But the 
ambition of the Church will be to create men with a 
passion for righteousness, and to use all its forces and 
all its influences to have righteousness realized by 
every person in every class and in every region of 
our private and social, our industrial, commercial, and 
national life. It ought to be as incapable of servitude 
to a majority as to a monarchy, to the masses as to 
the classes, and it is certain that subservience is the 
surest way to forfeit both obedience and respect. 
And only as it is above suspicion will it be able to 
accomplish the work of reconciliation, and the more 
it can reconcile to itself the more will it create a 
happy and harmonious people. For the Church more 
than any other agency in our midst can play the 
part of mediator. Not by intervening in strikes and 
strifes, but by bringing about the understanding that 
will prevent their occurrence. The gospel came to 
make peace on earth by creating in men good-wlil, 



The Conciliation of tlie Alienated, 53 

and there is no cause of ill-will like the conflict of 
interests conducted in the darkness of mutual ignor- 
ance and distrust. We are just being made to feel 
that the wars of industry ma}^ be as calamitous as the 
wars of peoples; indeed, the strike or the lock-out 
is but civil war waged under the forms suitable to 
these days. ]^ow, the Church should in the very 
process of fulfilling her duty do two. things, first, 
teach men of all classes to be in the highest Christian 
sense religious men in all their ofiices, trades, and 
relations; and, secondly, bring men of all classes 
together as men, make them to know each other, and 
look each at his own questions with the other's eyes. 
Men united and humbled before God, and inspired 
by a common sense of duty, might disagree, but the 
more they understood the more would they respect 
each other, and would the more reluctantly difler. 
The workman needs to know the master that he may 
comprehend his case; the master needs to know the 
workman that he may understand where the shoe 
pinches, and how it can be made to fit the foot. If 
they could so meet together that the master would have 
to cease to think of the workman as a servant, or as a 
being of inferior nature with inferior rights to his own, 
and the workman would learn to think of the master as 
a man beset on all sides with responsibilities and the 
servant, or even victim, of forces he deeply dislikes, 
they would soon discover through their common 
natures the community of their interests and the duty, 
which they must somehow find a way to fulfil, of 
living together in peace. And the only agency by 
which they can be thus united and made mutually 



54 Religion in History. 

intelligible is a church which knows them as 
men, but refuses to know them as interests or as 
classes. 

2. But over and above this general principle of 
fidelity to its own idea or mission, the Church must 
follow special lines or methods of action, and these 
ought to be as varied as the needs and minds of the 
people it would reclaim. 

(1) The Church must appeal to the alienated 
mind, seek to persuade it by reason and argument. 
It must become in a larger degree the instructor of 
the people. In order to this it must think more and 
better of its own mission, of the truth it carries that 
it may interpret and realize. Here almost every- 
thing has to be done; we need to escape from the 
bondage of the letter into the freedom of the spirit. 
The Church must be a learner before it can be a 
teacher, and it will find, when it speaks out of its own 
honest and living convictions, that none will hear 
more gladly than our workmen. Any man who has 
preached knows what a keen and appreciative audi- 
ence the}^ can form, more greedy of instruction than 
any upper or higher middle class congregation. It is 
in these latter that the impatience of the sermon has 
become decisive and uncontrolled, and this impatience 
largely means that instruction is not wanted because 
religion is conceived as a form or a service, not as duty 
and truth. Yet this cause does not stand alone. 
Nothing falls into contempt quite undeserved. Ser- 
mons worthy of respect will continue to be respected 
even by those who now conceive them as having no 
place in the worship of God. But the very desire for 



The Conciliation of the Alienated, 55 

knowledge and direction makes the want or the in- 
efficiency of the sermon a thing intolerable to the 
thoughtful working man. To meet his needs it must 
change its character and enlarge its range, must not 
fear to deal with the central questions of religion, to 
re-state and re-discuss the highest mysteries of Chris- 
tianity, to handle the criticism and theology of the 
Scriptures, to reason concerning Christian ethics, and 
apply them to all the problems and occasions of life. 
There is nothing the pulpit so much needs as courage, 
both in its mode of handling things and in its choice 
of the things it handles; there ought to be nothing too 
high or too abstruse, too critical or too philosophical 
for it, any more than too plain or too practical. It 
may be that want of courage is only another term for 
want of capacity; but whichever name be applied 
to the defect, it is one that every energy should be 
strained to repair and remove. The potentialities 
of the pulpit are incalculable; hardly any limit could 
be set to what it might accomplish. The whole 
realm of thought and feeling, truth and duty, history 
and life, art and literature, knowledge and action lies 
before it; crowds of anxious, expectant, perplexed, 
thoughtful men and women wait for its words. The 
mysteries that most appeal to the imagination, the 
history that most moves the heart, the hopes that 
most uplift, the fears that most abase, the motives 
that persuade the will, and the ideals that control the 
conscience are at its command, ready to be used as 
means to its ends and instruments of its power. 
What it needs is men;' if the Church could find men 
equal to its opportunity it w^ould possess and govern 



56 Religion in History, 

the mind of England, possibly most of all the minds 
of its working men. 

(2) The alienated life must be touched and 
changed. Carlyle long ago preached this gospel: 
^^Soul is kindled only by soul. To Heach' religion, 
the first thing needful, and also the last and the 
only thing, is the finding of a man who has religion. " 
And what is the Church but a nursery for the making 
of such men? But once they are made they must 
be distributed, the living soul must come face to face 
with the soul it has to quicken. And here much may 
be expected from colonies of the brave and good 
in our East Ends, and in all the districts, urban, 
suburban, and rural, where our workers congregate; 
but hitherto these have been composed mainly of 
young men, and we must, by ceaseless help and re- 
plenishment, take care that their surroundings do not 
prove stronger than they. There is no civilizing or 
Christianizing power like that of a good person, and 
the good person is most needed where the good are 
few. A thoughtful and observant medical officer once 
said to me, ^^ A single cleanly family raises the stand- 
ard of cleanliness in a whole tenement, and I have 
seen the removal of one attended by deterioration all 
round." And what is true of outward is true of in- 
ward cleanliness. The presence of the morally healthy 
acts as a kind of moral deodorizer, and his absence 
is the despair of the worker in the slums. If, then, 
the moral and religious colony is to accomplish any- 
thing, it must be carried out on a vaster scale than 
has yet been dreamed of. The churches must not 
fear to give of their noblest and their best, who cer- 



TTie Conciliation of the Alienated, 57 

tainly will not themselves refuse to be given, to the 
service of the brothers who live by labour. 

(3) But the place that most needs our care is 
the home where the alienated life is nursed and 
formed. We speak of the working man, and we forget 
his wife; but his wife is a more potent factor in his 
improvement or deterioration than he is himself. She 
suffers more in the struggle for life than he does, 
has fewer elements of change and brightness in her 
life, and readily falls into a hopeless drudge, unable 
to cheer, because incapable of cheerfulness. Yet 
she is more susceptible of cheer from her sister 
woman than her husband from his brother man. 
Here is a field where splendid work may be done. 
The poor have had more than enough of parochial 
charities, and congregational visitors, and oflQcious 
distributors of tracts which are seldom read. What 
they need is an army of good motherly or sisterly 
women, who will never be prying or condescending, 
but only patient and neighbourly, and who will stay 
in and cook the husband's dinner, or tend a fractious 
child, or even tidy up the room while the mother 
escapes from the hated four walls to breathe a fresher 
air and see a larger world. If we could only create 
the happier and more wholesome home, the battle 
were as good as won. 



CHAPTER IX. 

URGENCY OF THE NEED. 

1. What we have called the reconciliation of 
the working classes is a matter of vital necessity 
both to themselves, the State, and the Churches. 
We live in the generation that has witnessed the 
transit of power, and this means that for the battle 
to maintain our place and fulfil our function in the 
history of humanity we have called out our last 
reserves. The evils of no past sovereignty were 
irremediable, for behind the reigning house or class 
we had reserves vaster than the army in the field. 
When the king was supreme, we had an aristocracy 
often able, and always willing, to correct his blunders 
and save us from the results. When the aristocracy 
governed, we had the middle class, watchful, ex- 
pectant, capable, eager to embody in legislation 
their larger and more noble conception of the State. 
When the middle class had exhausted their energies 
and realized their ideals, we had the people waiting 
the opportunity for the exercise of their still untried 
strength. And now their opportunity is come, our 
last reserves are summoned to the front, and on 
their skill and endurance the issue of the battle will 



Urgency of the Need. 59 

depend. The moment is critical, for, as all history 
testifies, it is more easy to gain power than to exer- 
cise it wisely; and our modern democracies are, for 
reasons partially stated in Lecture IV., the very 
converse of the ancient. The ancient democracies 
were all in a sense aristocracies, i.e. they repre- 
sented the reign of a dominant order or race. The 
demos might be coextensive with the citizens, but 
the citizens were not coextensive with the popula- 
tion, citizenship being rigorously limited to men of 
a given birth and blood. Then, too, the old democ- 
racies were municipalities rather than nationalities, 
their area was so limited, their politics so simple, 
their opportunities for discussion so multitudinous, 
their legislative machinery so potent and direct, 
that it was not diflicult for the citizen to master the 
mysteries and the method of state-craft. He was 
trained in the discussion of political ideas from his 
boyhood; the city which was his state lived before 
his eyes, its statesmen passed him daily on the street; 
his public life was but private life enlarged, and as 
he knew himself only through his family, so he con- 
ceived his family as only through and for the State. 
But our modern democracies are an almost complete 
contrast to this, especially in those things that con- 
cern the exercise of sovereign power. The causes, 
represented by the growth and reign of Christian 
ideas, which abolished slavery and serfdom, have 
made the modern demos coextensive with the man- 
hood of the State. While the State is not a city or 
a confederacy of cities, but a series of nationalities, 
the people, into whose hands power has passed, are 



60 Religion in History, 

not a select and homogeneous race, or the citizens 
of a small city welded together by pride of blood, 
local ambitions and jealousies, and the need of hold- 
ing down a multitude of helots whose labour is 
necessary to their very being; but they are a mixed 
and heterogeneous multitude, as it were the helots 
rather than the citizens, not gathered into a single 
centre, but distributed through many provinces, 
each with a centre of its own, often more conscious 
of the many conflicting interests which divide them 
than of the few great common interests which 
unite. 

Now, it is impossible to conceive anything more 
critical than the recognized and conscious sover- 
eignty of a people so constituted and so placed, one 
more capable of inflnite good or incalculable ill. 
And the earliest moments in the use of power must 
always be the most critical, for they are the formative 
moments. In the modern as in the ancient world 
there will be opportunity enough for a Cleon to attempt 
to lead by flattering the vanity or the foibles or the 
greed of the many; or for an Aristophanes to at- 
tempt by savage satire of Cleon or brutal caricature 
of Socrates to befool the many and secure power to 
the few. But, happily, there is always a limit to 
the influence of the demagogue, whether he be an 
avowed man of the people or a disguised oligarch, 
and the limit is soon reached and rarely tran. 
scended. The more real danger lies in the tenden- 
cies common to human nature, especially the ten- 
dency to use power to gratify narrow interests, or 
sectional passions, or immediate and selfish needs. 



Urgency of the Need. 61 

Those tendencies have governed much of the legis- 
lation of the past, but their action was less injurious 
when thej operated through a single class or 
through several but mutually qualifying classes than 
they vrould be if they worked in and through the 
collective people. We are face to face, then, with 
what we may truly call the supreme moment of our 
history. It is the people that now rule, and unless 
God live in and rule through the people, the end of 
all our struggles, the goal of all our boasted pro- 
gress, will be chaos, — and chaos is death. 

2. The sovereign people, then, ought not to be 
sovereignless; but their only possible sovereign is 
the God who is Lord of the conscience. His is the 
only voice that can still the noise of the passions and 
the tumult of the interests. This does not mean that 
His sovereignty is needed to be, as it were, a bit and 
bridle by which they can be ridden or driven with 
greater ease; nor does it mean that its real or ex- 
clusive organ is a hierarchy or an organized clergy 
or oflScial priesthood; but it does mean that the be- 
lief in an Infinite Majesty who reigns over all peo- 
ples and all persons, and to whom all are, now and 
eternally, responsible^ needs to be worked into the 
very substance of the commonwealth and made, as 
it were, its common soul. And this work lies upon 
the Church as an imperative duty. 

Without the '^common people" who heard its 
Founder and Head gladly, it is depotentiated and 
impoverished. Its wealth lies in the souls it loves 
and teaches to love. Its function is to enrich their 
time with the ideals of eternitv. And churches 



62 Religion in History. 

composed exclusively of rich or poor mean the reign 
of the conditions and categories of time within the 
realm of the Eternal. A labour church is a creation 
more of despair than of hope^ an attempt^ as it were, 
to sanctify an evil rather than to cure it. The 
terms ^^ Master" and ^^ Servant," ^^ Capital" and 
^ ^Labour" denote relations the Church ought not to 
know, and may not recognize, and to embody such 
distinctions in her very name is but to run up the 
£ag of surrender. She carries for all mankind the 
noblest inheritance of our race, the wealth of divine 
love and grace, of human faith and hope and devo- 
tion, of saintly memory and heroic achievement, 
and only as she makes the inheritance she carries 
the possession of the common people, does she fulfil 
the end for which she was created. 



RELIGION IN HISTORY 



'^ We treat God with v^reverence hy hanishing Him from our 
thoughts, not by referring to His will on slight occasions. His 
is not the finite authority or intelligence which cannot he trou- 
bled with small things. There is nothing so small but that ice 
may honour God by asking His guidance of it, or insult Him 
by taking it into our own hands; and what is true of the 
Deity is equally true of His Revelation. We use it most rever- 
ently when most habitually; our insolence is in ever acting 
without reference to it, our true honouring of it is in its uni- 
versal ap2jlication,'' — Ruskin, "Seven Lamps of Architecture," 
Introduction. 

" To those who act on what they know, more shall he re- 
vealed; and thus, if any man will do His will, he shall know 
the doctrine whether it be of God. Any man, not the man 
who has most means of knowing, who has the subtlest brains, 
or sits under the most orthodox ijreacher, or has his library 
fullest of most orthodox books, — hut the man who strives to 
know, who takes God at His word, and sets himself to dig up 
the heavenly mystery, roots and all, before sunset, and the 
night come, when no man can icork. Beside such a man, 
God stands in more and more visible presence as he toils, and 
teaches him that which no preacher can teach — 7io earthly 
authority gainsay. By such a man the preacher must himself 
he judged. — Ruskin, " Notes on the Construction of Sheepfolds," 
'' On the Old Road," ii. §§ 201, 202. 

*' We do not at all know everything which ice have Luther 
and the Reformation in general to thank for. We have become 
free from the fetters of spiritual narrowmess, we have, because 
of our progressive culture, become capable of returning to the 
source and apprehending Christianity in its purity. We have 
regained the courage to stand with firm feet on God^s own 
earth, and to feel icithin us our human nature God-endowed. 
Let spiritual culture continue ever to advance, let the natural 
sciences grow) ever broader and deeper, and the human spirit 
enlarge itself as it will, — yet beyond the majesty and moral 
culture, which shines and lightens in the Gospels, it will not 
advance.'' — Goethe, < ' Eckermann's Gesprache," Dritter Th., 
pp. 372-373. 



LECTURE I. 

WHAT IS RELIGION ? 

Clear ideas are always necessary to intelligent 
discussion; but clear ideas are very hard to get, 
especially about the most familiar things. As a rule, 
what everybody is thought to know, nobody is found 
to understand. Xow religion is one of the most 
familiar of things. "We think, or hear, or speak, or 
read about it every day. Many are instructed in it 
every week of their lives. Yet were the question, 
What is religion? suddenly submitted to every man 
here, can you conceive what precisely would be the 
character of the answers? It is hardly too much to 
say that the variety, the contradictions, the confusion, 
the bewilderment, would be something wonderful, 
and most wonderful in the case of the men who 
thought that they understood the matter best and 
were quite prepared to put the perverted intelligence 
of the world right. To go to church, to go to chapei, 
to do Sunday School work, to read the Bible, to hold 
the faith of a given church, to observe its customs, to 
confess to the priest, to respect the parson, to agree 
with the minister, to believe in another world which 
has no concern with this, to be good, to do good, to 



66 Religion in History. 

love the society of good people — these, and such-like, 
might probably be found among the deflnitions. 

Now whether these do, or do not, fairly represent 
current ideas, one thing, and one thing only, is meant 
to be here perceived, this, viz., that if we start with 
different ideas as to what the term religion means, 
we shall never understand each other's meaning or 
mind, never at any point of the reasoning become 
intelligible to each other, and so shall never by any 
possibility be able to reach a common agreement. 
Men may use the same word to express not only un- 
like, but opposite ideas, and if language be so em- 
ployed it becomes a vehicle or means of hiding, not 
of communicating thought. Speech so used can 
only confuse and bewilder the judgment. Hence it 
is necessary at the outset of the discussion that 
we clearly and distinctly understand what the term 
'^Religion" means. If we can do this, much is 
gained. You may not agree with my meaning or 
my mind, but at least you will be in a position to 
understand my arguments and judge the cogency or 
otherwise of any train and process of reasoning. In 
the world of thought, mischief is caused more by 
confusion than by any other cause. Not otherwise 
than by clear thinking can man reason to any pur- 
pose or reach any clear and sound conclusion. 

NoAV I must begin by frankly bespeaking your 
patience. It is a hard matter to make intelligible 
abstract and abstruse things. You are many of 
you men accustomed to manual toil; I am a man 
accustomed to mental toil. I should be very much 
astonished and bewildered at the simplest processes 



What is Religion ? 6Y 

of your daily Tvork. You would have need to be 
patient in explaining the matter to me; and I often 
might be so stupid as not to understand the veriest 
rudiments of your craft. And so you may not at 
once see the issues and modes of a mental craft, that 
has occupied a man for many years more hours a day 
than any trades-union would allow him to work — has 
kept him hard at it in the early morning, at noon, 
and at night, until his subject may have become so 
much a matter of daily expression and association to 
him that he is unable really to estimate the difflculty 
of comprehension on the part of others not accus- 
tomed to the same methods and the same themes. 
Pardon me, then, if, to-night in particular, 1 occa- 
sionally become somewhat abstruse, and not as lucid 
as you would like me to be; but as we are concerned 
this night with the principles that underlie our 
whole argument, I must ask you to labour strenu- 
ously to comprehend these, that the later and more 
familiar discussions may have their proper place and 
force. 



Our question then is, ^^What is religion?" Now 
it is best to begin by clearing our minds. You know 
Dr. Johnson's advice, ^^ Clear your mind of cant." 
Now the cant it is needful to clear our minds of is 
the confused thought that may stand in the way of 
clear comprehension. To this end let us at once 
note this — the relation of the churches to religion, 
of religion to the churches. Now, many people, 
perhaps most people, look at religion through the 



68 Religion in History, 

churches, and cannot understand it apart from them. 
To many, church is religion, and religion is church. 
Religion is the Church's concern. What it does is 
the religious. What it does not do is secular, or 
profane, or outside religion. What it condemns is 
irreligious. Well, many, so thinking, set down all 
the good religion has done to the churches; while 
others, so thinking, set down all the evil the churches 
have done to religion. Books have been written, 
speeches are daily made, to show how mischievous 
the action of the churches has been; and, therefore, 
how mischievous the action of religion. The churches 
have often been on the side of the rich and against 
the poor; the churches have often been on the side 
of tyranny and against freedom; the churches have 
often repressed liberty of thought, and hindered 
free discussion; the churches have often produced 
churchmen who have been fond of place, fond of 
power, fond of wealth. And all these things have 
been set down to the discredit of religion — the sins 
of the churches been made its sins, the evil of the 
churches its evil. Now, I mean to reverse that 
process, and look at the churches through religion, 
not at religion through the churches. They exist 
for it; it does not exist for them; they are to be 
judged as they are faithful to it; it is not to be con- 
demned because they are unfaithful to their own 
great purpose and own great mission. Often the 
hardest obstacle to the realization of religion has 
been a church. An unfaithful servant may ruin a 
master; a church unfaithful may discredit religion. 
The great point, therefore, is to find what relation 



What is Religion ? 69 

exists between these, that the one may be rightly 
conceived in its ideal perfection, and the other rightly 
judged in its historical sin or imperfection. 

Let me illustrate what I mean. In Europe you 
have various types of polities. There is the impe- 
rial, absolute as in Russia; modified as in Austria, 
elective as in Germany. Then you have the monar- 
chical running through various degrees; personal as 
in Prussia, constitutional as in Italy, and constitu- 
tional and limited — very limited indeed — as in Eng- 
land. Then you have the republican, young as in 
France, centuries old as in Switzerland. K'ow do 
you identify these polities with the peoples that 
dwell under them? or do you distinguish the two, 
studying the polities and judging them in relation to 
the peoples? The polities that do most to maintain 
law and order and to distribute impartial justice, 
that really represent the people, that help the just 
distribution of capital and wealth, that do most to 
promote the happiness, the progress, the freedom, 
of their peoples, are judged by you to be good; but 
the polities that fail to secure these things are judged 
by you to be bad, and bad in proportion to their 
failure. You do not judge the people through the 
polity; but you judge the polity through the people. 
If the polity be bad you do not pronounce condem- 
nation on the people, but you pity them; you are 
gentle to them in proportion as the system from 
which they suffer is severe. jS'ow as polities stand 
related to peoples, churches stand related to reli- 
gion. The best polity is the polity that best secures 
highest material and social welfare; the best church 



70 Religion in History, 

is the church that secures most perfect realization 
for the ideal and spiritual — that is, the eternal, con- 
tents of religion. That polity which fails to do jus- 
tice to the ideal of man is bad. That church which 
fails to do justice to the ideal of religion is not good. 
But you will perceive that we have fixed an im- 
portant principle. Religion is not to be looked at 
or judged simply from the churches. The churches 
are to be judged by religion. Again I say, they exist 
for it; it does not exist for them. They are good as 
they realize it; bad as they fail in realization. But 
that involves two points; first the utter futility 
and folly of condemning religion through and be- 
cause of the churches; the utter injustice of identify- 
ing it with their imperfections and evils, or even 
holding it responsible for them. If a polity wrongs a 
people, depraves and hurts it, you don't declare that 
all government ought to cease; nay, you say, Let a 
government be created that shall do justice to the 
people, and help it to realize all the best possibilities 
within it, the w^hole ideal of society and of man it 
may contain. So, if you find imperfections in 
churches, do not use them as occasions to condemn 
religion; use religion as a law or standard to condemn 
these imperfections, and insist that perfect churches 
alone can do justice to perfect religion. Then here 
is the next and second point: you must have a posi- 
tive idea of religion before you can have a standard 
by which to judge the churches. The standard by 
which you judge a polity is the supreme good of the 
people. It depends upon your idea of the people's 
good how you judge the polity. But it is only a 



What is Religion? 71 

very recently recognized principle, this of the happi- 
ness of the people as supreme good. Old maxims 
were maxims like these: whose the region, his the 
religion; the divine right of the king to rule, the 
divine duty of the people to obey, so making people 
exist for king, not king for people. We now under- 
stand, thanks to agencies which will be discussed 
later, that the grand purpose of all government is to 
promote the highest weal of the people; that being 
reached, we can easily by due discussion determine 
the best form of polity and institution. So when we 
have got at the idea of religion we shall be able to 
determine in what way, by what methods, according 
to what polity, along what lines, churches must serve 
religion in order that they may serve the cause of 
God and of man. 

II. 

We have got then the length of seeing this point: 
that the churches exist for religion, and are to be 
judged purely by their capability or power of realiz- 
ing it. It is not to be held responsible for their 
imperfections; nay, these are to be judged by its 
perfection. But that only, as Ave see, throws us back 
upon the question with which we started — What is 
religion? But now, if we are to answer that, we 
must do so not only in a clear way, but in a large 
way; for mark! — man is a religious being. Look 
to the north and south, the east and west, and Avhat 
do you see? religions. Wherever you turn — man; 
wherever man — religion. ^ ^ No, " says some very wise 
person, '' not at all; there are low tribes, far down 



T2 Eeligion in History, 

in the scale, found without any religious customs, 
without any religious ideas; religion is not uni- 
versal. " Well, I will not discuss the matter, but will 
only say this: the greatest ethnographers, — that is, 
the men who have most extensively studied the 
customs, the manners, the beliefs of men, — are on my 
side in affirming the opposite. But I do not stand 
on that. If you insist on it, let us grant that there 
are low tribes without religion. What then? Why 
this: to be without it is to be fallen into utter 
savagery; to be without it is to have the sure and 
indelible mark of lost manhood and utter barbarism. 
A great and distinguished thinker, Schelling, wrote 
a great book, which started from this principle: — 
Man in the very act of founding society realizes 
religion; without religion there is no society; at its 
root, in all its customs, throughout all its laws, 
religion runs; and society is only where religion has 
begun to be. And that is a simple, certain fact. No 
man who knows ethnography, sociology, or whatever 
he may call the science which deals with the origins 
of institutions and civilization, will question it for a 
moment. Society and religion, as it were, begin to 
be together. Man cannot become a social, and 
therefore a civilized, being until he has a religion. 

But now that has brought us to this point — that 
religion, since as old and as universal as man, is 
natural to him. It does not need a miracle to create 
it; rather this may be said: its cessation would re- 
quire a miracle, would need the de-rationalizing, or, 
if you like, the de-naturalizing, of man. That might, 
along a great variety of lines, be proved to you. It 



What is Religion ? T3 

would not be so very difficult of proof either were 
time only granted; but this meanwhile may be said: 
So consonant are religious ideas with man's nature 
that that nature has always been at its best, whether 
in the individual or in the nation, when the religious 
idea was purest and when the religious idea was 
strongest. That is a matter capable of historical 
proof, absolutely incapable of historical disproof. 
Peoples that have been great in art have been great, 
for what reasons? To the Greeks, the masters in 
this region of all time, art was religious — the 
temple, the sculpture that glorified the god, de- 
clared the excellency of religion. Peoples, too, 
that have been great in literature have been great 
through their religious ideas. Look at the Jews. 
They were at the largest when at home a small 
people — a very little handful; they were rude, they 
were unlettered in a sense, j'Ct they created what, 
from the literary point of view, must be called the 
most extraordinary literature in the world. There 
is in India a wonderful literature, vast, immense; 
it begins with the hymns of the Rig Yeda, about 
fourteen hundred years before Christ, and comes 
down through the great Epics and Law Books and 
Philosophers to the Puranas, works almost of our 
own day. And what marks it? Religious ideas, 
and here as elsewhere, the purer and sublimer the 
religious idea, the finer and nobler the literature; 
only when it is lost in mythical and idolatrous 
extravagance does the literature become foolish and 
depraved. The Chinese have a great literature. 
What marks it? It is the exposition of the religion 



74 Religion in History, 

and the rule by which they seek to live. The Greeks, 
too, at their highest, noblest moment: what sort of a 
literature did they make? — what marks it? — religious 
ideas, and those very ideas were the breath of life to 
the men who vanquished Persia and made the drama 
and the philosophy of Greece. But it is not matter 
of art and of literature only. Take politics, the 
collective life, the freedom, the ideals which have 
been realized in all the higher and nobler forms of 
collective and social being, whence have they come? 
From religion; wherever there has been highest 
order, wherever there has been noblest freedom, wher- 
ever there has been a patriotism that did not fear to 
die and did not care to live, save in so far as it lived 
for fatherland and faith, there has also been as the 
factor and inspiration of all the rest, the reign of 
great religious ideas. It is a universal law. Man 
at his best, man at his noblest, has been so through 
the action and by the help of religious ideas. 

We see, then, that religion is something natural; 
that religious ideas are inseparable from our kind, 
that human nature is at its best when most religious. 
Now what does a wise man do when he stands face 
to face with facts of this sort? Does he begin a 
polemic against the absurdity of all religious ideas 
because of the false forms into which some have 
been forced, and the base uses to which they have 
been turned? No; when he stands face to face 
with this natural universalism, he asks, Whence 
are our common and imperishable religious ideas? 
Why do they everywhere come to be? Why has 
man in history been what he has been? Why has 



What is Religion ? 75 

he thought as he has thought? These are necessary 
questions; these are scientific questions. It is not 
enough to say, certain orders of ideas are incredible. 
There stands behind us man in his history, and the 
whole course of that history illustrates man's invaria- 
ble, uniform, absolutely universal tendency to pro- 
duce, or generate if you like, or evolve religious 
ideas, and to be, in the whole of his institutions and 
in all his social order, governed and determined by 
them. Why? that is the point — why? He only 
who is able to enter into the meaning of that why, 
and get a reason, has come within glimpse of under- 
standing the question — What is religion; for what 
it is depends in great part upon why it is. 

Now I am not going to pause very long on this 
matter — the why — though I would it were possible 
to do so. I stand at a point where the passion and 
studies of my lifetime all converge; such energy as 
belongs to me having through years, and anxious and 
laborious days, been directed to the study and com- 
prehension of some of the great problems that here 
arise. And when I see the shallow way in which 
many a man who thinks himself wise — wise from 
reading current magazines or newspapers — talks 
about matters of this kind, I feel, — if he could only 
be made to pass through twenty years of hard work 
along given lines, he would get to know enough of 
the matter he talked about to keep him at least a 
more modest man. But that is a matter only by 
the way. There are two great questions that arise 
out of that ^' why is religion? " — the one philosophi- 
cal, the other historical. The philosophical question 



76 Religion in History. 

asks the reason as to the existence, as to the 
coming into being, and as to the growth in history of 
religious ideas and religious customs; and seeking 
this reason, it comes to see, what all history makes 
manliest, that the production and growth of these 
ideas are inseparable from the genesis and evolution 
of the reasonable nature of man. For what is his- 
tory? It is a great attempt to realize man's inmost 
mind. It is but the externalization of what lay 
contained in him and his spirit. You cannot find 
that anything comes into being without a reason. 
You create institutions; this town is full of them: 
infirmaries, societies, unions — all manner of institu- 
tions; what are they? The realization of ideas, 
created by ideas, by thoughts which imperiously de- 
manded of man that he should so embody them. 
And it is the function of the philosophic historian, 
the man of science in the field of religion, to get by 
analysis at the whole history of the genesis of the 
ideas that create our religious institutions. He is 
not concerned simply about how they are, he asks 
why they are, and traces them back into man, where 
mind acts and dwells. But what is so native and 
necessary to man is no matter of chance or accident; 
it is there of purpose; it was built into his nature by 
his Maker. And what the Creator thus purposed 
appears everywhere in and with the creature. 

So much for the pliilosophical question, but the 
historical is quite as vital. It is a comparative one, 
concerned with all the religions of man. It puts the 
actual, extant, existing religions together, and com- 
pares them; and, comparing them, proceeds on the 



What is Religion? 77 

same scientific principle that comparative anatomy 
recognizes when it sees begin in the leaf the struct- 
ural plan or purpose which finds its culmination in 
the glorious form and moving image of man. And 
so you find running through the religions a struct- 
ural principle. Where that principle stands highest, 
in its greatest perfection, there and there only have 

you a perfect religion. 

\y' 

III. 

Now you see that this second discussion has carried 
us beyond the principle which was the conclusion or 
deduction from our first. Since man is unable to 
escape from religion, that which stands highest and 
is the best has most claim on his acceptance. Mark 
this — the people that has conceived the best idea of 
a commonwealth is the people farthest on the way to 
its realization, and the people that has the most per- 
fect or the ideal religion has the greatest, the human- 
est, the wealthiest of all possessions, for it is the 
condition of every other ideal good. But there is 
another point involved in this second discussion. Re- 
ligion is no affair of the churches. They did not 
create it. It created them. It is a great fact of 
nature, rooted in nature, growing out of nature, in- 
dissolubly connected with the whole system of nature 
or order to which man belongs. It is impossible for 
man to be, and yet to be without religion — observe, I 
say man, not men. Now, so much being determined by 
our two discussions, we are only the more completely 
and absolutely thrown back on our old question- 



78 Religion in Historij, 

What is religion, this universal, this natural, this in- 
alienable possession of man? We must get a large 
idea; and we must get a clear idea. Now perhaps 
the best way for me to proceed in attempting to an- 
swer this question will be by looking at the opinions 
of some great men concerning it, and in order to be 
perfectly fair and impartial it will be best to drop 
theologians out of account. Theologians may be 
dangerous: they may be, as it were, counsel retained 
for the defence. Well, we will ask. Are there any 
philosophers who can help us? Yes, many, for it is 
a mark of our best modern philosophers that they feel 
that they must face and answer this question — why 
is religion? and what is it? You know the old 
deist who lived last century was a very remarkable 
man. He thought he could make what he called a 
religion of nature; but then you see he made that 
religion out of his own nature; and his nature was 
not Nature's nature, but one that had been largely 
educated, civilized, refined, in a word. Christianized. 
As a result his religion was a purely ideal thing, a 
creation of his own consciousness, which had in its 
turn long passed out of a state of nature, and there- 
fore could not make a natural in the sense of a 
primitive or aboriginal thing; but what we want 
from the philosopher is not an ideal construction of 
that kind. We want to know what religion is, why 
it is universal, and what function it has to fulfil in 
the life of the individual and of the race. 

Now there are two points of view from which the 
question may be discussed — the subjective and the 
objective, or religion conceived through man and 



What is Religion ? 79 

religion in relation to man. We begin with the sub- 
jective, or more philosophical, for the function of a 
philosopher is this : — He seeks to explain what is or 
what comes to be through the nature of man, through 
the reason or the subjective personal capabilities of 
men. A philosopher is a lover of wisdom, and he 
goes in search of his wisdom not into the world with- 
out, but into the world within. But now it may as- 
tonish you — yet it is true — if I say that all knowledge 
of the world without is built on or involves a philoso- 
phy of the world within; and every natural science 
implies a given philosophy of knowledge and is de- 
termined to be what it is, not by its own processes, 
not by its imagined results, but entirely and abso- 
lutely by the relation in which it stands to thought, 
to knowledge, and therefore to the science concerned 
Avith what knows. Well, then, we will ask these 
philosophers to help us, and we shall find them so 
explaining religion that they fall into three classes — 
those who have tried to explain it through the intel- 
lect; those who have tried to explain it through the 
feelings; and those who have tried to explain it 
through the conscience. 

First, then, those who have tried to explain it 
through the intellect; and three writers come here. 
One man says it is a matter of belief— altogether of 
belief, and not at all of reason. Jacobi, a distin- 
guished German, said, ^^I believe; by my faith I am 
a Christian; by my reason I am a heathen." Is'ow 
that man's theory is worth nothing, and I will tell 
you why. Any theory that leaves a division in a 
man's own soul is false. If religion be a mere 



80 Religion in History, 

matter of faitlij unable to bear the light of reason, it 
is untrue to the nature the Creator gave the man. 
The second theory said, it is a matter of intuition; 
men, without proof direct, by action of intuitive 
reason, see the truths that constitute religion. This 
' was Schelling's view, but he erred, and for this reason: 
a man's intuition may be suflflcient for himself, but if 
made authoritative for other men, it is only dog- 
matism; it is his own affirmation of what he knows 
made to have universal validity. The third writer 
is Hegel. He said, ^ ^ Religion is a matter of thought, 
of spirit." Now Hegel stood in this position: — 
People say that we have knowledge of phenomena. 
They forget that knowledge is not phenomenal. 
Phenomc'iia are what appear. Take away the sub- 
ject to whom they appear, and where are your 
phenomena? Seek to find a world where there is 
no thought, and you will never find any world at all. 
You can never reach a point where thought is not. 
Thought ever is the principle alike of the intelligence 
and the intelligible; without it man cannot interpret 
nature, nor could nature be interpreted. Hence it is 
implied in all things scientific, for the scientific is 
simply the intelligible. And the thought which 
makes science makes also experience possible; and 
thence comes this very vast but most valid deduction: 
as behind all experience thought lies, so at the root 
of the universe thought is. What is necessary to 
explain me, is necessary to explain nature. I am 
thought, and since phenomena can be only as 
thought is, then the reason or consciousness which 
is the condition of their existence, cannot be itself 



What is Religion ? 81 

one of them. Nature^ then^ can be only as thought 
makes nature, underlies it, and builds it into an 
order or system. And that is apparent, for you can 
interpret nature only where you can take thought 
out of it, that is, only where you find the thought 
that is intelligible to your intelligence. There is 
not a language on earth that is not capable of 
allowing translation into any other language. This 
capability of being translated is the distinction 
between language and gibberish. You can take 
thought out of Greek and put it into English; 
you can take thought out of English and put it into 
Sanskrit; you can take thought out of Sanskrit and 
translate it into all the languages man has ever 
spoken. But what is the necessary condition? 
That thought be in the language. Where there is 
no thought, there can be no translation, nor can there 
be any language. There must be reason within in 
order that reason may be got out; and what is true 
of language is true of nature. Man coukl not get 
any natural science, could not get any knowledge of 
nature, unless nature were the great speech, the great 
language, an articulate and definite expression of 
thought. And as thought is the very medium in 
which reason lives and moves, religion as something 
rational has to do with thought, is our thought of 
the ultimate Being or Reason, and of our relation to 
Him. It is a matter of the Spirit within us and 
its relation to the Spirit without us; it is the thought 
wherein man, the individual, places himself in rela- 
tion to the universal — the intelligence in me to the 
intelligence that underlies all things. 



82 Religion in History, 

But now we come to the second class of explana- 
tions. '• ' Feeling^ " said the only theologian to whom 
I shall here allude, though he was quite as much a 
philosopher as any member of the band^ '^ Feeling is 
the source of religion^ a feeling of dependence.'' 
Now, you will note, a feeling of dependence is a 
thought of dependence. I cannot feel that I depend 
on anything or any one unless I think of myself as 
dependent. Without thouglit of the Independent 
upon whom the dependent self depends, no feeling 
of dependence is possible. Thought is contained 
in feeling. But another and specifically English 
thinker, with a similar idea, but as it were differently 
complexioned, has attempted to reconcile science and 
religion on the basis that worship, which is the 
essential element in religion, is feeling, the feeling 
of admiration. To admire is to Y\^orship; to worship 
is to be religious. But, now, you cannot have 
admiration unless you have found something admir- 
able; and if you have found something admirable, 
you have conceived it, you have thought it; you 
cannot have admiration without thought. Lastly, in 
this connexion, there comes that intellectually wise 
man, Mr. Herbert Spencer, who says, ^' Religion is a 
feeling, a feeling of wonder, a feeling of wonder in the 
presence of the Unknown." Now I don't wonder at 
his thinking wonder the root and essence of religion. 
I would, when his first principles are considered, have 
wondered exceedingly had he thought otherwise. 
It would be altogether inexplicable were a man to 
think that any other emotion whatever could be 
excited by the great Unknown. It is no extra- 



What is Religion ? 83 

ordinary thing that a man who translates the 
Unknown by force, persistent force, should think 
that wonder was the one fit feeling, the feeling in any 
way proper to religion, that could arise in its presence. 
But you see he does not get his feeling till he has 
got his thought; you must conceive that the Un- 
known is before you can wonder at it. Yet the 
most wonderful thing of all is his theory as to 
the historical genesis of the feeling. He derives 
the feeling after the supersensible, after the divine 
. — whence? — out of visions, seen in sleep, ghosts 
that have appeared in what we can only describe 
as the nightmares of a benighted and over-fed 
savage. Now if aught shows how men build 
theory without facing fact, it is a theory of this 
sort. There is not a historical religion in the 
whole world, save one, the Egyptian, that lends 
countenance to it, and that one, rightly understood, 
does not. All the rest, in China, India, through all 
Asia, in Europe, in Africa, with the one exception I 
have just named, and in America, all absolutely rise 
up and refuse to own it. The surprising thing, in. 
deed, is that a man claiming to be a sociologist should 
seek to explain religion by phenomena that no 
historical religion, with the proverbial exception 
which proves the rule, recognizes as of primary 
importance. 

Well, let us dismiss feeling as by itself, in any 
sense or degree, an adequate explanation of either 
the origin or nature of religion. All feeling means 
thought; you cannot feel unless you think; and 
you feel as you think. Then there is the next class 



84 Religion in History. 

of theories; and of these I will only mention two. 
One of them makes conscience the great mother ol 
religion; or, religion is our duty apprehended as a 
Divine command. That is Kant's view; and the 
second is like unto it, only expressing by the outer 
sign the inward source — its author being the dis- 
tinguished Englishman, Matthew Arnold. He de- 
scribes religion as morality touched by emotion. 
But mark this: — You cannot have morality without 
thought. Thought underlies all, and is generic, 
while the others are only specific. Now religion is 
thought; it is feeling; it is action. It is not one 
of these. Yet it is all these, and something more. 
Man thinks; as he thinks, he feels, as he thinks and 
feels, he acts. Thought is the parent, determinative 
of feeling; feeling is the source of the motive which 
impels to act — that is, is the occasion of action, not 
its cause. 

Well, when we analyze this subjective definition, 
what do we find? That religion is, on the side of 
the person, his thought of the cause, or order, or 
highest law under which he stands, and the way in 
which he feels and acts towards him or it. That is 
a very wide definition. We shall fill it up by and 
by. But I will indicate to you why it is so wide. 
It is wide for this reason: that it must comprehend 
all forms of religious expression or life that we may 
discover to exist. These have wonderful affinities. 
There is an African bending down before a fetish. 
He offers it a bribe; or perhaps he tries the opposite 
policy and castigates it — why? He thinks it can 
have influence for good or for evil on his life, and 



What is Eeligion ? 85 

so he seeks to secure the good and prevent the evil. 
There, again, is John Stuart Mill. He says, speak- 
ing of the woman who became his wife: '^Her 
memory became to me a religion, and her approba- 
tion the standard by which, summing up as it did all 
worthiness, I endeavour to regulate my life." So, 
the thought, the memory, and imagined approbation 
of his wife, became a religion. It was the religion 
by which he ordered his life. In both there is a 
given notion or conception of the position occupied 
and the influence exercised, in the one case, by a 
thing, which is yet conceived to be so alive as to be 
susceptible to flattery or abuse, in the other, by a dead 
woman, who yet lives as a moral ideal; and there 
results, on the one hand, the emotion here of fear, 
there of love, while, on the other hand, there is action, 
the sort of action the spirit which is in the thing or 
the woman who is idealized, is supposed to approve. 
Then there is the Chinaman who has great ideas of 
his ancestors, the ancestral spirits. He has a large 
calendar of saints, and a great hall where the sages 
of the past stand. He believes that all his people 
constitute a mighty organic whole, and he propitiates 
the spirits of the dead that he may live a happy and 
a dutiful life. It is a long cry from China to France; 
yetComte's notion of the worship of humanity, with 
its sages and calendar of saints, with much of its 
outward pomp and worship, is but the ancient 
Chinese thought amplified by baptism into the rites 
and associations of the Catholic Church. Our wide 
notion of religion enables us to comprehend under it 
systems as distant and dissimilar as these. 



86 Religion in History. 

lY. 

Now, when we have got a notion of religion on 
the subjective side, we want another of it on the 
objective; and here I must pray your simple atten- 
tion. 

1. Looking, then, at religion on the objective 
side, we may say, that the character of its highest 
conception — Le, the course or order or highest law 
under which man conceives himself to stand — 
determines its nature and quality; or, in other words, 
the highest conception which a religion possesses 
determines its moral character. A bad god can 
never have a good religion. As is the deity, such 
must the faith that is built on him be. Find out 
then the character of the deity, and you find out the 
character of the religion. In other words, discover 
the quality of a man's highest thought, and you 
discover the character and quality of the principles 
that regulate his whole life. That is absolutely true. 
You may take it of religion; you may take it of 
any intellectual system. Suppose, for example, that 
a man declares force to be the ultimate, or the only 
known ultimate of ultimates, how would it affect his 
notion of life and the law that governs conduct? 
First, I would ask you to consider whence the man 
got his idea of force. If you take mind away, what 
is force? A man tells me, ^ ' I know only phenomena. " 
Let me ask him, are you then a phenomenon? Are 
you? For if you are, then see this: phenomena can 
never determine each other; they may co-exist but 
they do not produce and govern one another; they 



TVJiat is Religion ? St 

must be determined or governed bj something real. 
To speak in English, not in Greek — things can 
appear only provided there are those to whom they 
appear. Take away the persons for whom are appear- 
ances, and where, pray, are the appearances? But, 
secondly, without going into metaphysics, let us see 
this: if a man postulates force as his highest thought, 
the primary or ultimate cause of all that is known, 
what follows? Force, according to its very idea, 
must exact in every change an equivalent for what 
is expended. Wherever force rules, the laws of 
mechanics rule; wherever the laws of mechanics rule, 
necessity rules; wherever necessity rules, freedom is 
absent; wherever freedom is absent, morality is 
impossible; wherever morality is impossible, duty is 
impossible, and all the varieties of service into which 
and through which a noble and ordered society can 
be constructed. The highest conception thus deter- 
mines the whole order of thought. Xow that idea 
of force, or the idea of creation that it is thought 
to translate, is a very old idea. The ancient Hindus 
knew it; and it is only an unconscious translation 
of Hindu thought into an ill-fitting English garb. 
Thousands of years ago it stood in Sanskrit, clear 
and unmistakable, in more scientific form than it has 
in English to-day, with results which it is hoped later 
lectures may make abundantly manifest. 

2. But, if you apply the principle — as is the 
highest thought, so is the system — to religion, you 
got this conclusion: if you have a God absolutely 
righteous, absolutely lioly, absolutely loving, all tlie 
system He creates or builds must be intended to 



88 Religion in History. 

conform to Him. But, simply because he is so 
spiritual and moral, its absolute conformity cannot 
be secured by any mechanical method. If it were 
made conformable by a mechanical method, this 
would mean that it was done by necessity, and 
necessity destroys morality; and hence we must 
qualify and complete our first by a second principle 
— the method and medium by which God secures 
conformity to Himself must be as moral as He 
Himself is: in other words, while God is the great 
determinative idea of religion, religion itself must 
always be realized through man. It must, I say, 
be realized through man — man free, rational, intelli- 
gent. Man stands open to God, God speaks through 
man. The pure in soul see and hear Him. Did 
you ever hear an oratorio? Who made it? Nature 
never made it, nor could she by herself alone take 
one step towards its making. Yet nature to the sus- 
ceptible ear is full of sounds, soft, loud, low, sweet, 
murmuring, gentle, varied, is a very orchestra of 
musical, rhythmical sounds; and the master spirit 
gathers into his vast imagination all these sounds, 
weaves them into splendid harmonies, and pours 
them out in the great organ swell, or the vast choir 
made of human beings, who yet make music as if 
they were one. And so the spirit open to God, 
God's true prophet, is the great master spirit telling 
the truth of God for the joy and the life of men. 

3. But this brings us to a third position. Since 
religion, while it comes from God, is yet realized 
through men, it is realized for the purposes of God. 
It exists for His ends, and for these alone. Now, 



What is Religion ? 89 

in looking at it as a great agent for carrying out 
God's purposes, wliat clo Tre see? Two things. 
First, religion has a power that nothing else has 
of making bad men good. There is no power like 
it for changing bad into good, the profane into the 
holy, the man unreal into the man most true. Science 
has not that power; nor has art. Science and art 
witness to the elevation of man; they do not cause it. 
Religion causes the elevation of man, and creates his 
science and his art. Secondly, the progress, the for- 
ward movement of the race of man, has been worked 
by good persons, persons made good by their religious 
ideas. That is an absolute law. Sometimes there 
is a sneaking kindness in the heart of a people in a 
certain stage of growth or decay for a statesman 
who is a brilliant scoundrel, because they conceive 
him to be a great, or an astute genius; but, when 
the reins of a state are in the hands of a brilliant 
scoundrel, the state is being driven right into the 
heart of a great evil, or some signal misfortune. It 
is only the good person that can create really good 
things; and so we may add, wherever you have per- 
sons, whether inside or outside Christianity, that lift 
men up, and send men forward, you find them per- 
sons inspired by religious ideas. 

And now we must from these positions draw what 
may be termed a provisional conclusion: — Since 
the great forward movement of the world is worked 
by religious persons, then the higher their thought 
the greater and more beneficent their power; the 
purer the idea that works in them and through them, 
the greater and grander will be the religion. I will 



90 Rp.ligion in History, 

not by comparison run through Brahmanism, through 

Buddhism, through Islam, through Egypt, through 

Greece; I will not try by comparison to show 

where this grandest idea is. But I will ask you to 

think of God as the, Saviour has taught us to think 

of Him, and then see how this bears on action. 

-He is not only almighty, but He is good, holy, wise, 

loving, tender, compassionate, just. Take for ex- 

^ ample: God is a being infinitely good; then He 

cannot but hate sin. He cannot but hate all conscious 

and voluntary guilt; but if God hates sin, the 

religious man, governed by his idea of God, hates 

it too, and lives that he may end its reign on earth. 

God is righteous. Then if He is righteous. He 

cannot but hate wrong ; all forms of wrong, 

personal, social, industrial, political are hateful to 

Him; and the man who is a religious man, governed 

by his thought of God, must live to conquer wrong. 

God is tender, compassionate; then all sorrow, all 

pain, and all anguish are to Him painful, the cause of 

deepest pity and regret; and the religious man lives 

to overcome all pain, to subdue it, to minister to it; 

to take the outcast, and the lonely, and the feeble, 

and the desolate into the protection of his great pity. 

God is love; then He loves to see man saved, to see 

him happy, to see happiness multiplied below; and 

so the religious man is the man who saves men, who 

creates happiness, who makes all earth a scene of 

wider joy and of grander moral worth. Theology is 

the interpretation of the universe through the idea of 

God. Religion is the regulation of life through the 

same great idea; it is the application to all things. 



What is Religion ? 91 

and all events, of the great, spiritual, moral, ethical, 
rational elements contained in that idea. 

Now that description of religion has yet to be 
filled up. Historically we must deal with it later. 
This lecture alone cannot be either complete or, per- 
'haps, fully intelligible, for it is only a vestibule, a 
hall, introducing you to what is within and behind. 
But even as the question now stands, mark this: re- 
ligion has become no simple way of merely saving- 
men; it saves them — but for God's ends, not simply 
their own. It is no mere method for giving peace 
in death, or a happy immortality; it accomplishes 
that by making time happy, and a happy society. 
Eeligion is in order that eternal justice, eternal 
holiness, eternal purity, eternal harmony, eternal 
love may, through man, be made everywhere to 
reign among men. Religion is that the purpose of 
God through all the ages may by men be more per- 
fectly fulfilled. Where it comes in its perfection, it 
comes for ends like these. If religion be this, where 
is the man who would not be religious? — and relig- 
ious that he may serve God and work the good of 

man. 

1/ 



LECTURE 11. 

THE PLACE AND SIGNIFICANCE OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 
IN EELIGION. 



Last Sunday evening we were mainly concerned 
with principles^ with an attempt to fix the ideal or 
standard for judgment in our discussions on religion. 
Without such a standard we cannot be just; can 
neither rightly understand^ nor fairly estimate, 
the action of religion in history. Justice is always 
discriminative, and the man who has neither 
the patience nor the mind carefully to sift a matter 
to the bottom, and distinguish what does, from 
what does not, belong to it, is not fit to be a judge. 
But the judge needs more than a discerning judg- 
ment. He needs an impartial mind and a stand- 
ard or norm, both moral and legal, by which to test 
or measure the guilt or innocence of the person he 
tries. That impartial mind no man can give to 
another; he must by earnest repression of passion 
and prejudice, by diligent criticism of his own temper 
and motives, by cultivation of simple and honest love 
of truth, gain it, and keep it for himself. Goethe said, 
^^I can promise to be sincere, but I cannot promise 
to be impartial." Controversy may be sincere, but 



The Old Testament in Religion, 93 

justice must be both sincere and impartial, and with- 
out justice no judgment can be just. 

Well, then, it is your part to cultivate and to 
exercise the impartial mind; it was mine to attempt 
to formulate the standard or ideal that should regu- 
late judgment; in other words, the law according to 
which you were to be asked to judge. That stand- 
ard or law was the idea of religion. That its sig- 
nificance may be seen, it may be necessary to recall 
it, or rather, the steps in the discussion that led up 
to and culminated in it. 

Note, then, religion is not Church. The churches 
are our means, or associations, or agencies, for its 
realization, good so far as efficient, bad in the degree 
that they are inefficient. If in their teaching they 
misinterpret its truths, if in their action they pervert 
or misrepresent its spirit, then, however loud their 
speech, however high their claims, they are irreligious, 
mischievous in proportion to their strength. While 
religion is no creation of the churches, it is the high- 
est concern of man, universal as man, necessary to his 
nature, inseparable from it, needing no miracle to 
create, in need rather of a miracle to uncreate, it. 
Since universal as man, ever}' true science and philo- 
sophy of man must seek to understand his religions, 
must find their reason or cause in him, and in the 
system to which he belongs; must find, too, that 
since necessary, the most perfect is the best religion 
for man, needed to perfect or complete his nature. 
But, then, if religion be universal, by what terms 
may it best be expressed or defined? Neither in 
those of thought or feeling, or action, but by some 



94 Religion in Hist07^y. 

notion large enough to combine the three. So it y/as 
described as man's thought as to the cause or order 
or highest law under which he stands, and the way 
in which he feels and acts towards him or it. Now, 
that definition was wide enough to comprehend the 
most distant and dissimilar religions. But, then, it 
remains empty till it be supplemented by an objective 
analysis. Now, that analysis revealed three points : — 
first, that in a religion the supreme idea was the de- 
terminative idea, viz., the thought, or conception of 
God, or what was made a substitute for Him. A 
bad god never had a good religion; as man thinks 
of his deity, so is he and so is his religion. But, 
secondly, while God was the determinative idea, 
religion was realized through men, and conditioned 
by the men through whom it was realized. And, 
thirdly, while realized by men, it was, as proceeding 
from God, a means to His ends. Hence the better 
the god, the better the means and the nobler the end. 
In short, the religion is the conception or idea of 
God applied to the ordering of life, and to the 
organization of society. If God be the absolutely 
good, supreme in all goodness, then to say that a 
religion worthy of Him exists, is just to say that life 
will be ordered and society organized according to 
the highest possible ideal. 

Now, this restatement and summary of the previous 
lecture is needed for two reasons in particular — first, 
to show what was not intended. There was no at- 
tempt at argument for the existence of deity, no 
endeavour after a constructive theism. Had I in- 
tended to prove the being of God, I should have 



The Old Testament in Eeligion, 95 

gone to work in another niethocL, along other lines, 
although they might have touched at one point the 
argument of last evening. It was the idea of religion, 
not the idea of God, that was under discussion; and 
so, secondly, the purpose was to explicate and 
formulate principles that should regulate judgment 
concerning it. Y^e are about to study certain 
religions in history ; but we cannot understand their 
character and action, unless we have a true and 
clear idea of what religion is as regards origin and 
essence and nature. That idea being formulated, 
the principles are expressed that are to be our 
standard, our ideal, applied or implied, in all our 
after discussions. 

I. 

1. Our study, then, is the study of certain religions 
in history, first that of the Old Testament, and next, 
that of the New. Now it ought to be possible to 
make that a scientific study, scientific in method, 
purpose, spirit, and it will be this, if we are able, 
in the brief time at our disposal, to discuss the pre- 
cise action of these great religions in the history and 
social progress of man. But this is a scientific 
study for a pre-eminently practical purpose. It is 
the duty of all men to seek for the truth, for only so 
is it to be found; but it is no less the interest of every 
man to discover what ideas and influences have been, 
in the long and varied life of our race, morally 
and socially healthful, and what morally and socially 
injurious. It must be to the advantage of every 
person to know the good; it can be to the profit of 



96 Religion in History. 

no one to maintain the pernicious or bad. For here 
we are all of us, in our own order and place, workers; 
we work by hand or brain, we work at the desk or 
in the mill, in the library or in the laboratory. And 
what we, as men who work, want to know, is this, 
what are the best principles for organizing society, 
for helping the creation of personal wellbeing, and 
no less for the making of the common weal, and so 
for the forming of a true commonwealth. Now, 
there is only one way in which we can do this with 
any real advantage; we must study man in history, 
that we may discover the great forces that have been 
the great factors of these results. It is only through 
the study of histor}^, scientitically pursued, that we 
can find out what ideas and agencies have most 
worked for good, have, by their action alike on the 
individual and on collective society, best served the 

^ progress, the peace, the wellbeing of the race. 

' Now, I confess, frankly and at once, that the 
truths of the religions of the Old and New Testaments 
are to me the ideas that have worked most creatively, 
beneficently, and progressively in history, have above 
all others brightened and enriched the lot of the men 
who toil. But let me also add, you are not to be 
asked to believe this on my word, but only so far as 
it is by history and argument scientifically proved. 
I must ask you to come to the inquiry with free and 
unprejudiced minds. You knoAV dogmaticism is not 
peculiar to men who believe; it is often more charac- 
teristic of men who disbelieve. You may almost 
any day find the most arrogant, because the most 
ignorant, dogmaticism disguised as scepticism — 



The Old Testament in Religion. 97 

indeed, I will venture to say you will find more in a 
week's issue of the so-called free thought press than 
in all the decrees of the council of Trent. All that 
I wish is the open mindj not the spirit that looks 
into the past only that it may find a weapon with 
which to beat the present, but the spirit only anxious 
to discover the beliefs that have most worked for 
human good. To such a spirit, and only to such, is 
a scientific study of religion in history possible. 

But what makes a study scientific? It is the 
method, the way in which it is done. Scientific 
study in the field of history simply means, a skilled 
man working in a skilled way for the discovery of the 
truth. Nothing is here possible Avithout skill, and 
skill gained by long and hard and patient work. Xo 
man can gain it by reading a few books and making 
them his authorities. He must go to the fountain- 
head himself. That man, and that man alone, can 
use the scientific method, who has steeped his spirit 
to the very core in the thought and mind of the 
people, the times, the literature, the religion, he 
seeks to understand and make understood. A man 
who knows both to-day and the past finds it difficult 
to be just to the past, but to the man who knows 
only to-day, justice is not at all possible. If you read 
the past as you read the columns of a newspaper, 
and judge it as you judge our current literature, if 
you carry back into it the opinions, associations, 
standards, and conflicts of to-day, then you study it 
as a prejudiced polemic or a pitiful controversialist, 
not as a scientific student. And what will be the 
result? Why, 3'ou will never get at the truth, you 



98 Beligion in History, 

will arrive instead only at falsehood and error; you 
willj besides, do the most frightful injustice to the 
past and inflict the utmost injury on your own mind 
by persuading it that it is seeking for the truth, when 
the object of its search is really material for con- 
troversy. 

But how, then, does the scientific student proceed? 
While enriched with the experience and critical in- 
sight centuries have been required to win, he so uses 
them as to look at the period he studies as it was 
amid its own lights and under its own conditions, 
judging it as a root, not as a branch of to-day. He 
follows history, watches its way, does not force it to 
take his. He does not think that to know a river 
you have only to look at it from the city that 
stands at its mouth, but he believes that to be 
scientific the explorer must ascend to its source, 
noting and measuring every rivulet that swells its 
waters. But to do this in history, what do you 
need? You need imagination, large scholarship, 
keen and earnest thought; so that you may, as it 
were, live in the past, and make it live its veritable 
life in the light of your own eyes. You must go 
back, say, into the Mosaic age, study Moses, study 
Egypt, study Mesopotamia, study Phoenicia, their 
peoples, their religions, their politics, their social 
state, their morals, their wealth and poverty and 
commerce; you must study, too, India, ancient 
through modern Arabia, the nascent Isles of Greece 
through their languages and mythologies; — and then, 
when you are full of all this knowledge, with your 
imagination quickened and kindled by it, you must 



The Old Testament in Religion, 99 

construct the world as it then was, and apply to 
its peoples and their conduct, not jours, but their 
own moral standards and ideas. But you do this, 
not simply to know the given period, but to under- 
stand its contribution to the common good and 
progress of man. You thus compare the peoples, 
their laws, customs, religions, and religious ideas, 
in order that you may seek to find out where, and 
when, and why these laws, customs, religions, and 
religious ideas arose; and then, possessed of this 
comparative knowledge, you try to measure these 
things in their influence on the then present, in 
their influence on what was then future, in their 
power to aflect for good their own age, and the 
ages that were still to come. The man who can go 
back and make an old religion live in its real his- 
toric being and relations, is the only man capable of 
applying the scientific method, either to religion or 
history. 

2. Now, I am going to ask you to-night to look 
at only one religion, though we shall try to do so in 
this comparative way, the religion which has as its 
peculiar literature the Old Testament. I would it were 
here possible to apply to it in fullest measure the 
historical and comparative method. But to do so and 
bring it and all the religions of its time into com- 
parison would take too many evenings from me, and 
would too much tax your thought and patience. A 
distinguished scholar, whose name is well known 
throughout Europe as almost the symbol for scientific 
inquiries on this field, said but two months ago to me, 
^^ If you want to prove the truth, the wisdom, the 



100 Beligion in History, 

sober and honest history of the Bible, and the purity 
of its religion, place it among the Sacred Books of 
the East. In these books there are many grains of 
gold, but they are hid in mountains of the most 
extraordinary rubbish; and the extraordinary thing 
is that it is the rubbish that calls forth the enthusi- 
asm and admiration of the peoples that own them. 
The sobriety of the Bible, the purity of its spirit, the 
elevation and devotion of its tone, make it occupy 
an entirely unique place. Placed among the Sacred 
Books of the East the contrast would make its truth 
only the more stand out. " While, however, it is here 
impossible to follow the comparative method, yet let 
me ask for the Book itself your earnest, impartial, 
careful consideration. To that, indeed, it has an 
indefeasible right. Simply as a piece of literature 
it is the most marvellous thing in the world. You 
call it a Book, but it stands there a literature, the 
creation of from twelve to fifteen hundred years, in 
fragments, some small, others larger, each fragment 
reflecting its own age, the earliest being most dis- 
similar and strange to the latest; yet with all its 
distance, and all its variety, this Book is so modern, 
and stands so near to us, that it may be said to be 
of all the books in the world the nearest to our 
spirits. It contains, from the literary and moral 
points of view, the most remarkable code of ancient 
times. It contains the quaintest, most beautiful, 
and graphic history. It contains the supreme devo- 
tional literature of the world, the literature that 
men in their highest moments of religious transport 
or of pious meditation have used to express thoughts 



The Old Testament in Religion, 101 

too deep for tears. It contains poetry that, simply 
as poetry, stands foremost in its own order, full of a 
great sense of mystery, full of an awful sense of suf- 
fering, pierced and transformed by a glorious sense 
of God. It possesses more than all a conception of 
God and an idea of man, without a parallel in the 
literature and religions of the ancient world. That 
Book is the noblest heirloom of humanity. To every 
man it belongs as an inalienable birthright. To its 
best truths, to its inmost heart, to its meaning, for 
this and for all times, you have all an indefeasible 
right. The worst of frauds were the act of the man 
who should cheat you out of it. The man who can 
use it only as the bone of a father wherewith to 
smite a son, only shows himself of the order of men 
who rush in where angels fear to tread. 

Of course, I know what is said in certain organs 
of what calls itself free thought. There are sayings 
in the Old Testament that sound not too retined to 
our dainty and delicate modern cars. There are 
persons in it guilty of acts that, measured by 
modern standards, cannot be called good, but must 
be pronounced evil. There are statements in it 
that seem to conflict with our latest wisdom, or are 
out of harmony with our last new science. It is 
easy to bring up hundreds of the sort of difficulties 
which we find raised by men who study it from and 
on the polemical platform of to-day. Such men will 
tell you, in gravest tones, of difficulties fatal to the 
religious claims and character of the book, but when 
you come to examine them, they turn out to be the 
mere creatures of ignorance, formed out of a theory 



102 Beligion in History, 

of the Bible and its religion, more akin to childish 
simplicity than to masculine intelligence. Before a 
true theory of its origin and meaning these difiicul- 
ties could no more liv3 than a man could breathe in 
a vacuum. Yet I feel tender to the man, so touching 
is his intellectual innocence, who would reject the 
Bible because of the doings of Jacob, the sins of 
David, or the perplexities in the history of Cain. 
His difficulties come to me like a reminiscence out 
of my own boyhood; his perplexities recall those 
that daily troubled the good and devout people 
amongst whom my earliest life was cast, only they 
had the wisdom to see that what perplexed them be- 
longed to the incidents of the history, not to the 
essence of the religion. 

But, now, instead of dealing with such things as 
if deserving of grave and detailed criticism, let me 
ask you a question. Do you thing these difficulties 
explain the Bible, the power it has had, and still 
has? Do they help you to understand it better, 
or do they make it in any degree intelligible to 
you? Do they not when regarded as making it 
incredible, and unworthy of respect, rather make it 
and its influence utterly unintelligible? For, think, 
in making the Bible ridiculous, what is it you make 
ridiculous? It is not simply a Book — that were a 
small matter, but it is a race, nay, two races, the 
two that have done most for civilization, that have 
created it, that form the noblest flower and fruit of 
humanity. What makes the Bible ridiculous, makes 
man so; what makes man ridiculous, turns his his- 
tory into the very march of unreason. You say, 



The Old Testament in Religion. 103 

perhaps, '^ These things offend my conscience, and 
what offends my conscience I must condemn. " ' Good ; 
they offend my conscience, and my conscience con- 
demns them; but to condemn the doings of Jacob or 
the sins of David is not to condemn the Bible, nay, is 
rather to vindicate it, for it did not record these things 
for our approval, but for our disapproval on the one 
hand, and for our personal instruction on the other. 
What conscience disapproves, ought not to be spoken 
of with approval, whoever or whatever may command 
us to do so. But before a man uses the judgment 
of his conscience on the acts of certain men or a 
certain nation as a reason why he should despise the 
Bible and reject its religion, ought he not to raise this 
prior question: — Whether he has got at the meaning 
of the book, and whether he understands the methods 
of its use? Think what the Bible has been to the 
devoutest and most pious of our race, the most moral, 
the most humane, the most gentle to men, the 
most obedient to God. Has it not been their inspira- 
tion for good, the power that has entered their lives 
and lifted them from the lowest of sensuous levels to 
the highest and noblest of spiritual ideals? And 
ought not this simple fact alone make our innocent 
objectors pause and ask, whether it is the Bible or 
their theory of the Bible that is at fault ? whether it 
has been the fortune of their ignorance to find what 
knowledge missed, or whether there has befallen it 
the fate of the unskilled sailor, who has mistaken 
the ripple on a sandbank for the long roll of the 
Atlantic waves. 



104 Religion in Histoi^y, 



II. 



1 . But these are mere introductory and formal ques- 
tions; and we must hasten to others more radical 
and material. What concerns us is the place and 
the significance of the book in religion, and of its 
religion among religions. Now, note this self-evident 
and apparent distinction: — the book is the history of 
a religion, it is not a history which is a religion, and 
it is with the religion and its history, and not simply 
with the book, that we are here concerned. I do not 
deny that reason, conscience, judgment, and all the 
faculties of criticism must be exercised upon and 
about the book, but it is less the book than its religion 
that we want to understand. And note, next, as the 
book is a history, or the materials for a history, so 
our concern with it relates not to questions in its 
literary criticism, but to the beginning or origin, 
the matter or nature, the growth, the progress, 
and the culmination of the religion. You have to 
study the religion in what it was, what it did, and 
what it became. In its course there is much mixed 
up with it that is historical setting, that belongs 
to place or time. But it is the kernel, the ever- 
lasting essence, the pre-eminent and abiding sub- 
stance that here concerns us, not what by the way 
falls off and perishes. 

Now, mark, the religion is said to come from God. 
That is not an incredible or irrational proposition: 
Nay, it is one that has the highest reason, though to 
attempt to demonstrate its reasonableness would lead 
us too far away from our proper subject. That revela- 



The Old Testament in Religion. 105 

tion is possible is here, if not conceded, yet assumed. 
I do not speak to atheists. I do not speak as an 
atheist, but as a theist to theists. And now to say 
that God is, is simply to say that revelation is possible; 
to say that God is not, is simply to say that revelation 
is impossible. If He is, He must be free to act; if 
He acts. He must be free to stand in relation to man; 
if He is free to stand in relation to man, He can 
speak to him and through him. There is a theism 
that denies God in fact, though it afllrms Him in 
words. The man who so limits God's activity as to 
prevent His action every moment and in relation to 
every man is no theist, but in the strict historical 
sense of the term a deist. Deism set God at a great 
distance from nature and man. The world went 
according to its own laws, without any help from 
Him; indeed all such help was described as inter- 
ference or intervention, as it were a violation of law 
on the part of Him who made the law; but to me 
such a deism is only atheism in providence. As I 
conceive matters, the laws of nature are modes of 
God's action, they simply express His ceaseless 
activity. Man's relation to God is based on God's 
prior relation to man, and so, if the being of God be 
granted, manifestative or self-communicative action, 
or, in other words, revelation, and as a consequence, 
religion folloAvs as a logical necessity, which only 
means a necessity in reason. Revelation and 
religion but express the continued activity of God; 
the idea of God regulates the history of the revela- 
tion and determines the character of religion. 
Since religion is from God but through man, man 



106 Religion in Historij. 

is the condition through which the institutive revela- 
tion comes. But, coming through man, it partakes 
of the imperfect, the earthly quality of the vessel 
that bears it. To an absolutely perfect religion, 
A'ou need an absolutely perfect vehicle. Until you 
get the perfect vehicle, you have not, and cannot 
have, perfect religion. 

Again, religion comes through men to make man 
perfect. Since it does not come to man as already 
perfect, it falls necessarily under the law of human 
progress. You cannot create a perfect moral char- 
acter. A perfect physical creature m^y be created, 
but a perfect moral creature is incapable of creation. 
He must act, he must be disciplined, he must be 
taught; he is made perfect by the things which he 
suffers. He is like ' - 

Iron dug frora central gloom, 
And heated hot with burning fears. 
And dipt in baths of hissing tears. 

And batter' d with the shocks of doom 
To shape and use. 

But tliis carries with it necessarily the position — 
since man is the vehicle or form through whom 
religion comes, then it begins to come to man in his 
least perfect moment in order that it may prepare 
him for a more perfect state. To think that the 
ideal of religion is at the earliest moment of its 
appearance already manifested in ideal men, is to 
have no historical sense, and so no faculty for the 
scientific study of history. It comes to the man, to 
i:he people, or the race, to make the man, the people, 
cr the race, into the perfect beings they need to be- 
come. Primarily and necessarily the man is below 



Tlie Old Testament in Religion, 107 

the religion^ but his elevation is ordered and meas- 
ured by its development. The religion comes to lift 
the man. And so its history exhibits, on the one 
hand, a process in man and, on the other, a progress 
in idea and institution; the process is the greater 
fitness of the vehicle, the progress is the greater 
perfection of the religion. 

2. Xow these statements and distinctions will 
help us to deal with the history of the religion which 
we believe to have come from God, but know to have 
been realized through man. It has, therefore, 
necessarily the imperfection of the form through 
which it comes, conditioning what belongs to the 
perfection of the source whence it proceeds. But 
from these more or less external questions, let us now 
advance to questions essential and central; and note 
this — the distinctive, the great determinative prin- 
ciple in the Old Testament v/as the conception of God. 
And you must distinguish here between the con- 
ception and its history, what belongs to it by virtue 
of its own nature, and what belongs to its reflection 
in the miuds and in the history of the men, or 
people to whom it came. 

We shall take the conception first; and here we 
must note that it Avas a new thing in the world. It 
came expressing faith in one God, a monotheism, — 
the parent of all other monotheisms. As it was 
the first it became the greatest and purest, and it 
expressed this pre-eminence in two emphatic ways, 
by name and by character. 

(i.) By name. This age is greatly exercised to 
discover a name for the Primary Cause, It has 



108 Religion in History, 

been termed the Unconditioneclj the Unknown, the 
Unknowable, the Unconscious, the Infinite, negatives 
all without a single positive trait. But of all the 
names for the ultimate Cause or God ever discovered, 
the grandest yet most descriptive was that used by 
the old Hebrew men. Note that name — Jehovah, 
or Yahveh; Lord as it is given in our English ver- 
sion, or as the French give it, the Eternal. Now, if 
you resolve it into its original speech, what does it 
mean? Its meaning, though about it there have 
been many discussions, is yet clear. It must mean 
either He who is, or He who causes to be. It is then 
a verb, but it is a verb used as a proper name. He 
who causes to be, or He who is. 

But apart from this all the older and earlier names 
of God came from one of two sources. First, they 
were borrowed from nature, its phenomena, pro- 
cesses, or events. Such were the Indo-European 
names, those of the stock to which we ourselves be- 
long. Their names were all primarily physical terms, 
the earth, the sun, the blue heaven, the starry 
heaven, the great sea, the hills, the moon, the dawn, 
the sunset. These all provided names for God, but 
mark the result! The gods all partook of the quali- 
ties of the nature that supplied them with names; 
like it they were unstable, stormy, tempestuous, var- 
iable; they had a created and limited being, and were 
gifted with passions like men, so that when men 
stood in relation to them, it was as fully on a par or 
equality with them. And this followed — no people 
of our stock ever thought of God as a Creator, not 
one. Wise people in these days say, the idea of a, 



The Old Testament in Beligion. 109 

cause created the idea of God. But we must recog- 
nize this plain historical fact, that not a single prim- 
itive god of the race to which we belong, from India 
to Western America, had the idea of creation asso- 
ciated with him. Every god was a created being, 
stood in the circle of nature, passionate, stormy, 
variable, manlike. 

The second great source of divine names was Man, 
his political offices, metaphysical attributes or func- 
tions. God was called the strong, or the mighty; 
He was called the King, or the Lord, and men were 
His servants. Now, the stock of which the Jews 
came used names of this order, and what did the 
usage mean? That, as the King was, so was the 
god conceived to be, as was the Lord, so was the 
Almighty. In the East the despot reigned, and so 
God was thought to be arbitrary, cruel, bloodthirsty, 
propitiated by human sacrifice. In the East, kings 
cared not for men, but only and always loved power, 
even though bought by blood and death. And as 
were the kings such were the gods, — violent, des- 
potic, prone to an anger that could be appeased only 
by blood. 

These, then, were the old conceptions, but now 
came this new great conception: — God is not a mul- 
titude, He is one, and we call Him by no name that 
suggests man, by no name that suggests nature; we 
call Him — He who is, He who causes to be. He is 
one, beside whom is no fellow. He is a person; His 
^^Thou" stands over against my ^'I," He is not 
caused, but He causes; is boundless, mighty, potent, 
powerful, personal, Jehovah. This name of God, 



110 Religion in History, 

this great and mighty name, could help men to think 
under other forms, in another and nobler fashion, of 
the great and supreme One. 

(ii.) Now, note the next point — the character. 
The fundamental idea as to character stands ex- 
pressed in the formula, ^' Be ye holy, for I am holy." 
God is holy, and only a holy man, only a holy peo- 
ple, can please Him. Therefore, the religious man 
must be a good man. ^^Of course," you say, ^'of 
course. We all expect a religious man to be a good 
man. The most pious ought to be the most honour- 
able of men." But, pray, why do you expect him to 
be this? No heathen of antiquity ever expected any 
such thing. Piety had nothing to do with the gen- 
eral personal virtues; ethics were the concern of the 
schools and the poets, not of the temple and the 
priests. A religious man in the ancient world did 
not need to be a good man. Why, the gods them- 
selves were not good, — often most utterly iniquitous 
and bad. In India, in the old hymns you could get 
written in honour of a god a drinking song that any 
man in these days in an hour of hilarity might fitly 
sing. In beautiful, skilful, radiant Greece, what was 
Zeus, their great god? — an adulterer; what was 
Aphrodite? — personified lust. If 3'Ou had said to a 
Greek, you ought to be god-like, he would have said, 
^^Nay, I will be man-like; that is more noble and 
honourable than to live after the manner of the gods." 
And if you had gone east into Phoenicia where the 
neighbours of the Jews lived, what would you have 
found? — You would have found gods, impurest of the 
imj)ure, served not only by human sacrifice, but by 



The Old Testament in Religion. Ill 

blackest, vilest, human lust. Religion was no moral 
thing then, in any degree whatever, and where it 
had power without morality its power worked in the 
most immoral way. Imagine then, the transcendent 
moment for man, the moment of supremest promise, 
of grandest hope, when the idea of a moral deity en- 
tered his heart, and passed into his history, when 
all the energies of religion came to be moral energies 
for the making of moral men. That was a moment, 
I call it, of revelation — you may call it of supreme 
guesswork or grandest discovery; or you may, by 
magnifying incidental difficalties, attempt to conceal 
from yourselves its meaning. Yet it were only to 
speak with prosaic soberness were we to say, — the 
moment when gravitation, navigation, the secret of 
the sea, of the sun, or the stars, or the earth, were 
discovered had neither singly nor all combined equal 
or even approximate significance for man. Take 
from the heart of him this religion steeped in moral- 
ity, made living by the moral character of its God, 
and you will leave him without the grandest energy 
working for good and peace and progress that ever 
came into his history or into his heart. 

3. Now let us see where we stand: we have got 
the distinctive character and quality of the new 
idea: — God is one, personal, supreme, self-existent, 
a Being who can be named after no object in nature, 
and no attribute or oflftce of man, but only as He 
who is or He who causes to be. And He is moral 
— high and severe in righteousness. He loves good 
and hates evil. As He is His people ought to be; 
no service but moral service can be acceptable to 



112 Religion in History. 

Him. Such, then, was the idea; but it was one thing 
to get it, another to translate it into reality and life. 
A generation may suffice for the one, but centuries 
are needed for the other. The ideal was of God, 
but the realization was through man, and we must 
distinguish what belonged to the perfect Source from 
what was proper and peculiar to the imperfect me- 
dium. The religion did not stoop to the level of the 
people, the people had to struggle up to the altitude 
of the religion, and their struggle was attended by 
many an error, many a fall, and many a wilful apos- 
tasy. Indeed, it remained ever far above them, and 
so proved its divinity, just as their failure proved their 
humanity. Consider what they were, and Avhere 
they stood, when they received the religion of God 
and His law. Slaves, just escaped from Egypt, with 
the vices of their kind, ignorant, unstable, stubborn, 
impatient of freedom, accustomed to a cruel and 
crushing tyranny, rebellious under an authority too 
moral to coerce. Then, imagine them settled in 
their old land, undisciplined men, unfamiliar with 
an ordered life, with all the arts of peace to learn, 
surrounded by such religions as I have described, 
envious of the licence they allowed, anxious to be let 
sin as their neighbours sinned, and to conceive, 
appease, and please Jehovah as the other peoples 
conceived and appeased and pleased their gods. 

Now, let me put two questions to you, how ought 
you to judge a people so placed? By the standards 
of our day, or of their own? And, again, how 
ought you to judge their religion, — through the peo- 
ple, or the people through it? In the first place, 



The Old Testament in Religion, 113 

could you conceive a people so situated and so con- 
stituted, producing of their own mere will and out 
of their own poor nature such a religion? It stood 
in conflict with their habits, their passions, with all 
their circumstances, with what they most liked and 
most desired. Now, can that which stands in radical 
contradiction to a nature be a product of the nature 
it radically contradicts? In the next place, can you 
wonder that the religion and the people were often 
in collision? The collision was altogether to its 
honour — its standard being so high, but altogether 
in keeping with their nature, its tendencies and 
instincts being what they were. Yet why do you 
judge the Hebrews more harslily than you judge 
any other people of antiquity? I am not saying you 
are wrong in so judging, I am only asking the 
reason. They were not worse, they were better 
than their neighbours. Their kinsmen, the Arabs, 
were incomparably more cruel, treacherous, and 
bloodthirsty. The Phoenicians^ kinsmen too, far 
richer and more cultivated, were proverbial for lust, 
lying, and greed, for a horrible lasciviousness that 
made them pollute every shore and people they 
touched. The Assyrians, also kinsmen, were tyran- 
nous, ruthless, and exterminating to a degree that 
made them hated and feared throughout all the 
ancient world. Mow, why are you so severe to the 
comparatively moral and inoffensive Hebrews, while 
you are silent as to the awful immoralities that 
made kindred and contemporary peoples a positive 
plague, causes of utmost disaster to their own and 
later times? Is it not because you expect more of 



114 Religion in History. 

the Hebrews, which surely can only mean that you 
judge them by a higher law. But why do you so 
judge them? Is it not because you think them 
possessed of such a law, and hold them to be men 
bound to live according to it? But do you not 
see that in so judging, you are paying the highest 
possible tribute to their religion? To the degree 
that you condemn the men, you praise their law; 
in holding that they ought to have been the best in 
living, you acknowledge that their religion was the 
best. The standard you apply to Israel, Israel sup- 
plied to you, but in falling below it, what did Israel 
confess but that his standard was not of himself, but 
of his God? 

III. 

1. We have seen, then, the new theistic or religious 
idea and the people in themselves and in their mutual 
relations. We must now proceed a step further. 
Remember that the determinative thing in religion 
is the character of God. Well, we have got a God 
with a moral character, but have made no attempt 
at an analysis of its moral elements. These, when 
we first find the idea, are few and simple, but its 
character becomes in process of time ethically sub- 
limer, purer, richer. Here, the first thing necessary 
is to see how, even in its simplest form, the new idea 
affected the organization of society and the regulation 
of life. These two, — the thought of the divine and 
the thought of the human, — are related as ideal and 
reality, as design and structure; and so we can test 
by history the action of the divine idea in human 



The Old Testament in Beligion. 115 

society and life. For here it acted according to a 
law common in all religions, the highest idea is 
distinguished from all others by its being the force 
which causes the society to crystallize or become an 
organism. In order that we may perceive what 
this means, let me ask — Suppose you conceive God 
as force, or soul, or energy, without morality or 
moral character, then how would you conceive 
human life and human society? A man may say, 
' ^ I believe in force, and I believe in necessity, yet I 
am a moral man, and hold a moral theory of life." 
But see, there is no logic like the logic of fact. There 
is no law of reason so inevitable as the law that fulfils 
itself in historical movement. We are able to see 
when we turn to history the regulative and organizing 
power of a highest conception which is void of moral 
qualities and acts by necessity, working on the most 
stupendous scale. Let us look at India. What has 
been the great organizing power of society there? 
The notion of Brahma. That name represents a 
conception as nearly as possible parallel to Mr. 
Herbert Spencer's ^ ^ persistent force. " Brahma is an 
ever-acting indestructible energy. From him proceed 
by necessity all the forms, varieties, forces of life. 
What men call the soul, comes to be by necessary 
law, revolves through innumerable cycles, remaining 
in each and in all the same as to essence, changing 
only its form. The human person is a transitory 
shape or vehicle, which incarnates and carries the 
soul — which is an entity, or atom, or invisible force 
that circles from form of being to form of being, 
until its cycle of multitudinous changes being com- 



116 Religion in History. 

plete it is absorbed into Brahma. The life that now 
is, which is determined by lives that have been, 
determines in its turn lives to be; each life is but 
one new link in the chain forged by Brahma, who sits 
at the source of Being, a necessitated creator, and 
waits at its end, an unconscious goal. While indiv- 
idual life is so conceived, what of the social, the 
collective? Man's place here is determined by that 
awful, inevitable force which binds his various forms 
of existence together. Now, as it depended on 
whence the soul or person had first proceeded, from 
the head or from the feet of Brahma, whether the 
man was to be high caste or low caste, so the whole 
social system was a system that expressed in an 
organized form the operation of an unmoral cause. . 
There was no moral basis of society, only one of 
prerogative and privilege; and so, as a necessary 
result, to break caste was to break the highest law. 
There was no sin like the sin of infidelity to caste, the 
worst apostasy was for a high caste to become an out- 
cast, the last presumption for a low caste to attempt 
to enter a higher. And so India represents a society 
organized on the principle of a creative force with- 
out moral idea or quality, and shows on the most stu- 
pendous scale that from such a conception, the only 
possible result is tyranny, or a life governed by an 
unmoral necessity. If the cause of man and society 
be not moral, neither the man nor the society can 
recognize moral law as their regulative principle, 
and where moral law is not so recognized, force, 
— either physical, civil, or sacerdotal, — is the only 
alternative. 



The Old Testament in Religion, 117 

2. Let us turn now lo lae regulative and organizing 
action of the Old Testament idea of God. This we 
have to observe in its most rudimentary form in the 
Mosaic Society. And here let me ask you to note 
what I may call its extraordinary Secularism. By 
that term I mean to indicate the place given to time^ 
and to realizing in time the order that should express 
the mind and will of God. It is simply a matter of 
exegetical and historical fact, that of all religions in 
antiquity, the Mosaic laid least stress upon the future 
state, or life to come. This, of course, relates to its 
earliest stage. But it is here that the value of the 
idea as a new basis for society can best be seen. 
There was a very great and learned book written 
last century by a most belligerent divine, a mighty 
man of controversial valour — Bishop Warburton. Its 
name was The Divine Legation of Moses^ and its 
purpose was to prove what has been well held to be 
a paradox, this, namely, that the Hebrew or Mosaic 
religion was, by its not appealing to the sanctions 
of the future, proved to be of divine institution, 
and altogether miraculous in character. All other 
religions, it was argued, maintained their authority 
by invoking tlie sanctions of another Avorld. To this, 
the Hebrew was an exception, and since it ruled 
without help from the future, it could only have 
come to be by the direct action of God, and have con- 
tinued authoritative by His immediate and constant 
guidance and superintendence. Now, I do not mean 
to endorse that opinion, or even so much of it as 
relates to the absence of the sanction drawn from 
the future life, but this I mean to do, to say that 



118 Beligion in History, 

emphasis was in the Mosaic state laid od the present, 
on time, on the construction of such a state in the 
world that now is as should be altogether in harmony 
with the will of God. The men who were called to 
constitute that state, were not invited to do so in 
view of rewards and punishments that were to follow 
in another life. They were not able to glory in the 
inequalities of this life as certain to be redressed by 
the rewards of the life to come. They were not 
persuaded to neglect the transient present because of 
an imperishable future, but they were told to build 
up where they stood, as living men, a city that was 
in its laws, in its character, its work, its ideal, to be 
a city of God, a state constituted and constructed 
according to the divine plan. And this was to be 
done because God, who created the world, so com- 
manded. And as he was moral, the laws that 
were at the root of the whole were moral laws, 
enforced reverence to God, dependence upon Him, 
worship that was moral obedience, truthfulness, 
honesty, chastity, neighbourliness, filial devotion, 
and love. 

Two points here call for notice: — -first, the in- 
dependence of the Mosaic ideal of the future proves 
the absolute independence of the Mosaic religion of 
Egypt. The Egyptian religion was a religion of the 
future, absolutely and altogether concerned about 
man's happiness there. The Mosaic was the religion 
of the present, making men work in it for God and 
His purposes, for man and his good. And, secondly, 
this religion, as giving a moral law alike to the 
individual and to society, was an absolutely new 



Tlie Old Testament in Religion. 119 

thing. Xot only did it directly concern the present, 
but the idea, as applied to the governance and 
organization of life, made God the supreme law-giver, 
while His supreme law was moral. He founded the 
state, He gave the law. He called the state into 
being for His purposes, and to do so was to give it a 
sublimity that no other ancient state had, a universal- 
ity not of fact, but of idea, that made it without a 
parallel or peer amid all the ancient states and 
empires. Where the fundamental laws of a people 
are moral, and are the laws of a moral Deity, the 
tyrannies of despotism and conquest or force are at 
an end. 

IV. 

1. But now we shall the better sttidy the action of 
this great creative idea Avhen we place it in rela- 
tion to the notion of man. This must correspond to 
the notion of God. The one is the counterpart and 
mirror of the other. Now the Mosaic religion, as it 
was the first that had the idea of a moral Deity, was 
also the first that had the notion of man as a moral, 
free, conscious individual, with rights no man could 
take from him, and with duties no man could fulfil 
for him. The full significance of this, especially as 
regards its social and political action, will become 
apparent if you note this — that the great notion in 
all the ancient Empires was, the king or the priest 
owns the people. The idea of man as a conscious, 
rational, moral individual, of worth for his own sake, 
of equal dignity before his Maker, did not exist in 
antiquity till it came into being through Israel. Do 



120 Religion in History. 

30U think I mis-state the matter? Let us see the 
fact. Did you ever look at the great pyramids of 
Egypt and ask, why or how they came to be? 
Millions of nameless men died to create for two or 
three almost unknown kings a tomb. Look at the 
largest: — one hundred thousand men are said to 
have worked by forced labour every day at its build- 
ing, and it took twenty years to build. A hundred 
thousand men driven by force through twenty years 
to unpaid labour, and all to build a tomb for a king! 
Imagine every able-bodied man in a city as large as 
Manchester or Liverpool, forced for twenty years to 
work without pay for the vanity of one man, and you 
have a single illustration of the value of man and 
his work as the remoter antiquity understood it. Do 
not let this surprise you. Take some of the hymns 
of ancient Egypt, which of late years have been re- 
covered, and you will find the king praised as god, 
extolled as divine, all divine qualities being attribut- 
ed to him. Pass from the valley of the Nile to the 
valley of the Euphrates, and ask what do you find 
there? The king is the master of men, he can muster 
his thousands by will, by will he can throw his thou- 
sands away, and it is his concern if the men are lost; 
the loss is his, not theirs. No man has worth, save 
to the king and for his ends. No man is valued as a 
person, or as a man. The idea of manhood, as any- 
thing real or possible, does not as yet exist. Go still 
further east, to India, and what do you find? As a 
man acts to the priest, the Brahman, so his place in 
this life and the life to come is determined. What- 
ever maintains the purity of caste is rigiit, whatever 



The Old Testament in Fieligion, 121 

interferes with it is wrong, and life is everywhere 
under a shadow because without the dignifying 
presence of the moral ideal. But when the Mosaic 
state came into being, what did it bring with it? A 
new notion of man, a higher conception of manhood. 
It had no king, God was King, every man of the 
people was precious in God's sight, each had an equal 
worth, all had equal duties and equal rights. The 
idea of the rights of man and the correlative idea 
of his duties, were created by the religion that gave 
the moral idea of God. In no ancient state was 
man more dignified, was life so valued. To touch it 
was to touch what God made and protected. The 
very sovereign was good only as he did God's will, 
and his last sin was to oppress the people he had 
received from God. 

2. But we have not only to consider the idea of 
man, we have to see man built into a state. Now the 
basis of the state is a moral one. And it is moral 
because it is the Avill, the expressed will of the moral 
Deity. God is to be honoured as the One God. He 
is to be revered. ^lan is to remain pure, to be no 
adulterer, to speak the truth, not to covet, not to 
kill, not to steal. All duty laid down by God is law 
to be fulfilled by man. Now, I have already said 
that the gods of the ancients were, as a rule, unmoral 
or immoral, that as a consequence religion was no 
friend to morality, was often most lustful and impure. 
But now, note, that in and under and because of 
Moses came the idea that to serve God you must do 
your duty by mr.n, must be obedient and faithful in 
the simplest daily tilings. Xow, I do not intend to 



122 Religion in History. 

defend the Mosaic law — which is here taken to mean 
no more than those ten Commandments which are 
the heart of all the Levitical legislation — as a perfect 
law for all time^ or to say that it contains all morality. 
It was impossible that the earliest form of the Hebrew 
religion could be as perfect as the latest, but it had 
as a germ all the capabilities of growth and expan- 
sion needed for ultimate perfection. And this I 
further say, that from this moment moral life at 
once in the state and in the man is based and 
built on this great ethical conception of God, and 
God's will, as a moral will, becomes the basis of 
human society. 

Now, we have to observe a further consequence, 
the state became God's. This, too, was a new idea. 
In every other ancient state, in Greece, in India, 
in Assyria, in Egypt, the state owned the gods. 
They were the state's. The state possessed the 
religion, and the men who belonged to it must be 
of its faith. If a man questioned the gods, he 
questioned the law, and was guilty of treason in its 
most offensive form, and so the state put him to 
death. To question the law of the state in matters 
of religion was so much a crime in the eyes of the 
heathen that persecution seemed a natural and 
obvious necessity. It was indeed the coming of 
heathen ideas into the Christian religion that made 
freedom of thought anywhere in any Christian land 
a crime. You will see then that the notion of the 
ancient world was by the Hebrews here reversed; 
the state did not own God, He owned it, founded it, 
and founded it in order that His will, a moral will. 



The Old Testament in Religion, 123 

might be done ivithin it. That is the fundamental 
social conception of the most ancient Hebrew legis- 
lation, and it is therefore moral while social, and 
moral and social because religious — the Moral Deity 
is the basis of society, and He proclaims, defines, 
and enforces the law regulative of life, both individ- 
ual and collective. 

Y. 

1. But the law could not be moral without becom- 
ing much more, and so it had to become social, eco- 
nomical, and religious as well. And this in the 
course of the centuries it became, progressively more 
and more. Yet the influence of the moral centre 
and basis never ceased to extend to the circumfer- 
ence and summit. As to these wider aspects I can- 
not speak in detail, but will simply note three points. 
First, of the law in relation to Xature. There never 
was a saner law than the Mosaic. It loved Xature, 
could not bear to see the fields impoverished, and 
decreed that no man should be allowed to injure 
either his posterity, or his neighbours, or the land 
on which they lived, by impoverishing its fields. 
Nor could it bear to see the human form mutilated, 
and so it declared that only the unblemished was 
beautiful in the sight of God, and fit to do Him 
public and sacred service. It did not lore to harass 
or burden the dumb creation; the ox that trod out 
the corn was not to be muzzled. The young tender 
tree was protected, and was not to be unduly taxed 
to yield abundance. The law was thus full of a great 
sense of the good of nature, a great sense of the 



124 Religion in History, 

glory within humanity^ and of the large and lovely 
harmony without. 

Secondly, the law in relation to man. There never 
w^as so careful a law about what we call sanitation. 
It cared for the cleanliness of the body. It feared 
infection, and separated those with infectious dis- 
eases from the great multitude, declaring them un- 
clean. Its laws of ceremonial uncleanness had great 
health in them — a real human sanity. Then, though 
it knew slavery, as all the ancient world did, the 
slavery it knew was of the gentlest, the most gener- 
ous kind. Every man taken as a slave could, in the 
sabbatic year, regain his freedom, go forth into the 
world a free man. Its laws, too, concerning the 
wealth of man, were noble laws. They made 
property sacred, yet did not allow its accumulation 
in a few hands, or in one, but sought to secure its 
fair and equal distribution. Every Jubilee year 
the land was redistributed; the old families that 
had lost it might again possess their inheritance. 
And so if by misfortune, or by crime, a man had 
lost his estate, he had a chance given to him to re- 
deem himself and his place in the community, to go 
back into his old and better order. Capital, also, 
was carefully guarded, that it should not become an 
immense and oppressive power in the hands of the 
rich, to make them extortionate over the poor. We 
may indeed, Avithout fear of contradiction, afllrm that 
the Jewish law is the justest law to the poor yet 
framed, to the man that toiled, to the man prepared 
honestly by sweat of brow and labour of hand to earn 
his bread. Let us do it justice. I ask for it from. 



The Old Testament in Religion, 125 

you only justice, but justice I do ask; for that is only 
a just demand. Where the idea of a moral God and 
a free, responsible man came in and held possession 
of the people, there, applied to the questions of 
industry and economics, emerged a law that secured, 
as far as law can secure such things, the equitable 
distribution of wealth, and the highest degree of 
individual wellbeing. 

But, thirdly, we have to note a characteristic 
peculiarity in the laws relating to God and His 
service. Among the surrounding states of antiquity 
the Mosaic state stood distinguished for one thing, 
the absence of human sacrifice, a matter most signi- 
ficant as to the character of God, as to His way of 
educating and teaching man. Human sacrifice was 
one of the commonest and most horrible rites of the 
ancient religions. And it was one of the hardest 
things to bring the Jewish people out of the 
common and coarser into the rarer and kindlier 
service. Remember that question which the prophet 
represents the king as asking: ^^ How shall I come 
before the Lord, and bow mvself before the most 
high God? Shall I give the fruit of my body 
for the sin of my soul? " That was a common 
question in the ancient religions. But in its answer 
Israel stood alone and pre-eminent: — ^^He hath 
showed thee, man, what is good. And what doth 
the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, to love 
mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?" The 
answer is significant alike of the new dignity and 
worth of man, and of the new and noble tenderness 
in the character of his God. 



126 Religion in History, 

But YOU may say, ^^See how many of the laws 
are imperfect and severe, nay, even cruel. Take, for 
example, the law against witchcraft. ^ Thou shalt 
not suffer a witch to live. ' Had not that law to do 
with the burnings for witchcraft in the sixteenth, 
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries? And how can 
you defend the religion against the charge of burning 
people for an impossible crime? " Now there are 
here two questions, one as to the law, and another 
as to its interpretation or application in later history. 
^^ Thou Shalt not suffer a witch to live, " must be 
looked at through the eyes of that time, in the spirit 
of a historical student, asking the meaning of a 
religion, and what witchcraft signified to it. It did 
not mean an old woman addicted to black arts, who 
burnt before the fire the image of a man w^ho was 
thought to decay as the image melted. It meant the 
presence and power of the religions lying around. 
It stood in necessary alliance with them, and in 
necessary antithesis to the fundamental idea of a 
moral religion, realized in a moral life. And it was 
a simple necessity if the religion of Israel was to 
remain and not be superseded by the cruel and 
lascivious religion of Phoenicia, that the witch who 
was, as it were, the very prophet and priestess of 
Phoenicia, and the worst elements in heathenism, 
should not be suffered to live in Israel. The other 
question, as to its interpretation and application two 
or three centuries ago, is another matter altogether, 
and for it the men of that time are alone responsible. 
They did two things — they misunderstood the pur- 
port and function of the Mosaic law, and they forgot 



Tlie Old Testament in Religion. 121 

the relation in which it stood to the law of Christ. 
It was only preparatory, provisional, intended for a 
time long past, and passing with the time for which 
it was intended. Any man who scientifically looks 
at the matter, sees that the law of Moses, or the 
ideal of the Mosaic state, was not uniyersal and 
permanent, intended for all time. Men have thought 
that it was, as perhaps Calvin, when he founded his 
Theocracy at Geneva, and the Puritans, when they 
founded their Church-State over in New England. 
The mistakes of these men are to be judged, like 
all other mistakes of historical interpretation, as 
reflecting on the men, and not on the law they 
misunderstood. Then, for the further point, come 
to the moment when Christ declared the true yet 
simple relation in which the transitory and per- 
manent in the old law stood to Himself. It had 
been said, ^ ^ An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a 
tooth, but I say unto you, that ye resist not evil. " 
Here was a law written and formulated as Mosaic, 
but it was a law designed and fitted onl}" for an im- 
perfect state, intended, therefore, to be repealed and 
cancelled in a state higher and more perfect. And 
this single is an illustrative case. Do not judge a 
provisional as if it were a permanent law, a law for 
a people like the Hebrews as if it had been the ulti- 
mate code of the Christian Church. The moral 
elements in Moses abide, the ceremonial and occa- 
sional have passed and perished. 

2. We have as yet discussed but a very small part 
of a very great subject; and time will allow us to 
discuss no more. All that has been attempted has 



128 lieligioh in History, 

been to bring out the distinctive Hebrew conception 
of God as the source and basis of the distinctive 
Hebrew state. We must end; jet I feel as if I had 
not brought you even within sight of the boundless 
riches of the marvellous book which we call the 
Scriptures of the Old Testament. Here, indeed, one 
feels the pathos of standing on the narrow shore, and 
looking over the boundless, unexplored, mysterious 
ocean. Beside us a prosaic disputant may stand 
and say, ^^What see you but a barren expanse of 
water, vexed by angry winds? " But let our answer 
be: ''• Man, be silent; we are looking over the mighty 
pathway of the peoples, and we see it thronged with 
argosies hastening to distribute their unsearchable 
wealth among all kindreds of the world. " It is not 
possible to describe .this wealth, but let me in a 
hurried sentence or two indicate its kind and extent. 
Well, then, no literature of antiquity is possessed 
with so deep a love of the poor, speaks so strong and 
generous words concerning them, surrounds them 
with so much dignity and so many rights as this 
Old Testament. I know what I say, and I say 
what no man who knows antiquity can contradict. 
Without the Bible labour would be without its 
noblest vindicator, without the one ancient witness 
that testified in behalf of its honour and its claims. 
There is no book that so denounces the king who 
dares to oppress, or the priest who dares to deceive 
the poor, that so praises the man who does justice 
and loves mercy. To help the poor is to please 
God, to wrong them is to provoke His wrath. The 
ideal king is one who ^ ^ Shall govern thy people with 



Tlie Old Testament in Religion. 129 

righteousness, and thy poor with judgment.'' ^^He 
shall save the children of the need}', and shall break 
in pieces the oppressor. '' ' ' He shall deliver the poor, 
and him that hath no helper.'' '^ He shall redeem 
their soul from deceit and violence, and precious 
shall their blood be in his sight." Connected here- 
with is its love of the weak and defenceless, the way 
it seeks to honour and guard the woman and child. 
Do you know how Roman law dealt with the father? 
It invested him within his family with absolute power, 
over against him the wife and child could not be 
said to possess any rights; and the Roman law is 
the finest blossom of the Roman spirit, and in the 
field of civil legislation of all antiquity. But in the 
Old Testament the great preachers who speak in the 
name of God will allow no such absolute power to 
man; not right, but duty is in proportion to strengtli; 
the greater the weakness, the greater the claim on 
the resourceful and the strong. ^ ' Children are an 
heritage of the Lord," to be dealt with as riches 
held in trust for Him. The man he most approves 
is the one who ^ ^judges the fatherless and pleads for 
the widow." Then there is no book so full of the 
love of honesty, the praise of justice between man 
and man. It hates ^^the false balance," the lying 
tongue, the over-reaching spirit. It commends alike 
the generous master and the faithful servant. In a 
word, its ideal of life — industrial, domestic, civil, 
commercial — is the highest, purest, sublimest, known 
to the ancient world, for it is an ideal that struggles 
towards the creation of righteousness in all persons 
and in oil relations. 



130 Religion in History, 

But why attempt to sketch in hasty words the 
meaning and wealth of this marvellous literature? 
Let me simply urge you to read it anew^ with open 
eye and clear vision. Look at its proverbs^ so laden 
with moral wisdom^ so possessed with the belief that 
true goodness is best prudence, and obedience to God 
the condition of all good. Look at its Psalms; what 
wonderful poetry is there ! It has no parallel or peer. 
For thousands of years these Psalms have been sung, 
and men sing them still, feeling as if they were the 
most modern, the most living of all religious songs. 
They have been translated out of their primitive 
Hebrew speech into almost all our human tongues, 
and have become, as it were, the universal language 
in which man can tell his joy or sorrow, his contrition 
or exultation, to God. Then, look at its attitude to 
the profoundest of all the problems that can vex the 
human spirit, the problem of the good man suffering 
in an evil world ! That was the problem of Job and 
the second part of Isaiah; in the one the perfect man 
is the man who suffers most, in the other the servant 
of God, his anointed, in whom his soul delighted, is 
the Man of Sorrows, and acquainted with grief. The 
perfect man and servant suffers that he may redeem; 
his holiness and our sin are the twin causes of his 
sorrow, but as the sorrow of the holy it can save the 
man who has sinned. His suffering is the redemption 
of his kind. Then, think, with all its sense of evil 
and sorrow it never lost hope, but found in the 
presence of wrong only a deeper need for faith in a 
righteous God, new ground for confidence in a reign 
that would right all. And so we see those marvellous 



The Old Testament in Religion. 131 

prophets, turning from a time of impotence and evil, 
when the little handful of their people, beset, harassed, 
hunted, broken, could not realize their own imperfect 
vision of the prophetic ideal, look forward and anti- 
cipate the true golden age when peace and joy among 
nations, wealth and perfect manhood among men, 
should everywhere prevail. The fulfilment of their 
vision tarrieS; but their God reigns, and it will surely 
come! 



LECTURE III. 

THE PLACE AND SIGNIFICANCE OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 
IN RELIGION. 

The fundamental idea of the previous lecture was 
this — The religion of Israel' was an altogether new 
order of religion, and it was this by virtue of its 
conception or thought of God and His law. By 
means of these it laid the basis for a new notion of 
man, a new type of society, a new structure or order of 
humanity. So long as men believe in a multitude of 
gods, they will never believe in the unity of man; so 
long as they believe in a deity without moral character, 
they will never live under what they feel to be a 
common moral law. Might will be right. Their 
world will be the strong man's world, where the 
weakest goes to the wall, and the poor, unpitied, live 
or die to please the rich. 



1. Now, the change that has made our idea of man 
and society so unlike the ancient, is a change that 
begins with the notion of God and His law that came 
through Moses. That is a simple matter of historic 



The New Testament in Eeligion. 133 

fact and certainty. No code of antiquity possessed, 
in anything like the same degree, so exalted a notion 
of man, of the rights of man, of the dignity of man's 
labour, of his duties, of his moral worth and relations, 
of his claim to reap and to possess the harvest of 
profit, or of plenty, his own hands had sowed. It 
was not the priest's, or the king's law, it was God's. 
In that lay the secret of its power, the source of the 
great dignity it gave to man. Make the law the 
king's or the priest's, make king or priest own the 
people, and you have as an inevitable result despotism, 
oppression, wrong, sacrifice of the weak to the strong. 
Make the law and the people God's, and you have as 
an inevitable result, the equality of all men before 
God, and, once that is clearly and fully understood, 
the equal freedom and the equal rights of all men. 
The law which came through Moses was, to the 
people as a whole, the most generous, the most 
righteous law of antiquity, reposing as it did on the 
humanest of all the ancient conceptions of God. 

IS'ow, I wish to restate and re-emphasize tliis 
central and fundamental idea, or principle. What- 
ever men may say, it is incontestable, a simple fact 
which history has verified. You will never build a 
society or a state, ordered, free, righteous, unless 
you build it on a great moral belief, and the greatest 
of all moral beliefs is the belief in a moral Deity; 
for that makes the source, the laws, the method, the 
course, the end of life, all alike moral. A society 
built up from the foundation consistently according 
to that notion, would be a perfect society, but to a 
perfect society you need not only a great theoretic 



134 Eeligion in History. 

principle, you need perfect persons, equal in their 
perfection to the theoretic belief they hold. But the 
function of great beliefs is not to lind perfect men, 
but to make them, to take the poor material it gets, 
and out of it to build up nobler characters and nobler 
men. To take the individual, the isolated men and 
acts of a given race, or a given people, and make the 
system bear the blame of their imperfections, is to 
act, perhaps, in the spirit of controversy, but not in 
the spirit of science, which seeks to discover the 
action, through persons or peoples, of great beliefs on 
man, and in this action to see their character and 
quality revealed. Now I am able to say, as another 
simple and incontrovertible fact, of all ancient 
literatures, of all ancient writings possessed by man, 
the writings with the largest sense of humanity, the 
greatest sense of the rights of the individual, the 
noblest conception of labour and its reward, of 
society and its functions, are the writings of the 
Hebrews. Nowhere is the king so reproved, no- 
where is the priest so reproached, when either dares 
to forget his supreme obedience to God, or his su- 
preme duty to man. If either dares so to forget, 
the prophet stands forward, and says, '^ Bring no 
more vain oblations: incense is abomination unto 
God; your new moons and your appointed feasts 
His soul hateth. Wash you, make you clean; put 
away the evil of your doings from before His eyes; 
cease to do evil; learn to do well; seek judgment, 
relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for 
the widow." 

Now let me ask you as open-minded men to 



Tlie New Testament in Beligion. 135 

consider this simple question; since every ancient 
empire, as the pyramids of Egypt and the records of 
Babylonia show us, despised the common people, 
forced them to labour as if they had no claim or 
right to their own strength and the profits of their 
own skill, and threw away their lives as if tliey had 
no personal worth — Why is it otherwise with us? 
Modern Oriental empires, where the ancient basis of 
society still in a measure survives, have the old 
contempt of man and life. China will see a thousand 
men perish with less concern than we would see a 
score. Before we went to India life was squandered 
as if it were a worthless thing; our care for life in 
India has within this century caused so extraordinary 
an increase of the population as to bring upon us the 
gravest of all economical questions — How deal with 
a people whose increase threatens to outrun the 
means of subsistence? Why, then, do we so value 
life? Why do we so value man that we seek to 
secure to every one the reward of his own labour? 
Why do we so hate the pestilence or the famine, the 
war or the accident, which comes to destroy noble 
and valued being? History supplies the answer, the 
facts which cannot be disputed, and they say that 
the right to your own labour, to your own manhood, 
to 3^our very personal freedom, in a word, the ideas 
that make men of you, run back into the belief in 
God and God's law that came through Moses. 

Let us abide by the facts; do not let any man 
divert you from them and what they teach. Do not 
let a sneer at a Hebrew patriarch or king by a man 
too ill-informed and prejudiced to understand him, 



136 Eeligion in History, 

and the times in which he lived, lead you away from 
the real point at issue — Why is man and his labour, 
why are the common people and their rights, so 
differently esteemed and valued now from what they 
were in the ancient world? And comparative science, 
working with the historical material, finds only one 
answer — these ideas rose in connection with the re- 
ligion of Israel, and have their primary source and 
basis in the great beliefs it created and supplied. Yet 
it was only provisional, imperfect, a mere prophecy 
of a more perfect method, of a nobler order and a 
larger faith. Without the preparatory, the final and 
perfect could not have been: without the perfect, the 
preparatory had been but a promise, a blossom that 
had never rounded and ripened into fruit. 

2. We come now, then, to the New Testament and 
its significance for our question. In dealing with it 
we must not change our standpoint or our method. 
W^e must apply the same principles; we must look 
at all matters under the same lights as heretofore. 
Now, while the religion of the Old Testament aimed 
at creating a state or organizing a people on the 
basis of the belief in the one personal and moral 
Deity, and of obedience to His law, we may describe 
the religion of the New Testament as a method for 
creating and constituting a new humanity, and this 
new mankind it seeks to create and constitute by its 
idea of God, and what that idea contains and makes 
manifest. It is not, observe, a religion of anxious 
individualism, concerned about nothing except saving 
isolated souls; careful only to make men contented in 
life, peaceful in death, and happy in eternity. It may 



Tlie NeiD Testament in Eeligion. 137 

accomplish these, but these are only means, not ends. 
In its essence it is a mighty plan, splendid in its 
design and in its efficiency, for the construction, from 
the base upwards, of a humanity or a society that 
shall, in all its parts, through all its members, in ail 
its relations, express or articulate the righteous will 
of God. It is thus an ideal for the whole of humanity, 
and a great method for its realization. It is at this 
point that it stands at once related to the religion 
of Israel and distinguished from it; what Israel 
tried to do for a people, the Xew Testament came to 
do for mankind. What existed as particular and 
provisional in the old, exists as general and perma- 
nent in the new. 

Here, again, the great constitutive factor, chang- 
ing and regulating the individual, building up and 
organizing the society, is the conception of God. 
And the place He occupies, as well as the way 
in which He is conceived, makes a generic differ- 
ence between the Christian and other religions. 
Yarro, an old and most learned Roman, said, ^'In 
order that gods may be established, states must 
first exist." That was the pagan idea, the state 
owned the god, and the god had no power or 
authority outside its own state. In perfect harmony 
with this notion the emperor or king was deified in 
a way that greatly astonishes tlie men of to-day. 
Suppose the people of England were to call their 
Queen goddess; or suppose the people of Russia, 
dark and benigiited as they may seem, were to call 
a man, vvhose moral character was like the late 
Emperor's, god, what would you think of them? 



138 Religion in History, 

Yet in the days of Christ and His apostles^ the high 
blooin-time of the Roman empire, men like Nero, 
who could fiddle while Rome burned; men like 
Caligula, who drank, feasted, and committed crime 
of the worst imaginable sorts, were called divine, 
and they received honour and worship as gods. 
Yet, strange as all this may seem, it was logical, 
it grew out of the idea that the state was greater 
than the religion, and established the gods; they 
did not own but were owned by the state, it was 
their factor, they were not its. And as the state 
was thus more divine and comprehensive than the 
religion, the person who symbolized its authority, 
its unity, and being, could be fitly termed divus 
or even deus, Now why would the use of the term 
goddess to queen or god to emperor seem to us 
so profane? Is it not because there has passed into 
our blood, into the very marrow, as it were, of our 
spirit and mind, a conception of deity that makes 
these old conceptions unutterably degrading? But 
does not this very elevation of our conception of 
the divine measure the influence of Christianity? 
It has so exalted every man's idea of God as to 
make the ancient idea abhorrent where it is not 
unintelligible. 

II. 

1. ISTow if we are to understand the significance of 
the ISTew Testament for our discussion, we must come 
to it with open spirit, and look at its idea of religion 
as embodied in its great Personality. In other words, 
we must seek to understand its idea through Christ, 



The New Testament in ReUgion, 139 

Xow His life was one of very remarkable simplicity, 
and one of still more remarkable signiflcance. It was 
altogether, from the religious point of view, unlike the 
ideal that had become traditional in Israel. For 
religions may grow, but they may also decay, and 
the distance between the vision and thought of an 
Isaiah, and the ideal and embodiment of a priest or 
a scribe or a pharisee in the day of Christ is almost 
immeasurable. The traditional ideal in Christ's day, 
the period of decadence, was twofold, there was the 
priest's, and there was the scribe's. The priest's idea 
was — the temple, the worship, the priesthood are the 
religion. God dwells in the temple; He is ap- 
proached through His priesthood, He is appeased by 
their sacrifices, and the most pious Dian is the man 
who most often visits the temple, uses the priesthood, 
ofi'ers the costliest and greatest oblations. The idea 
of the scribe was diflerent, yet akin. It was an 
ideal of forms, full of fasts and holy days, formulas 
and prayers, positions and phylacteries, reading of 
Scriptures and general performance of things by 
rule. In short, it was men living by rote, accord- 
ing to the fashion of the fathers or the times. The 
priests said, ^^Xo man can please God, unless he 
worships in a consecrated place, employs authorized 
persons, uses the proper and catholic means." The 
scribe said, ^'Xo man can worship God, unless he 
stands by tradition and follows what it prescribes." 
Worthy men they were, no doubt, honest after their 
lights, scrupulous, obedient to every jot and tittle of 
the law, forgetful only of one thing — that the law 
of God was infinitely greater than their thoughts. 



140 Religion in History, 

Their ideals, I have said, were akin, and their 
kinship stajids expressed here: — they made scrupu- 
lous men, men of most rigid conscientiousness, Avho 
would have gone to prison or the stake for a rite 
or a privilege, but they never yet made magnani- 
mous men, who would have died for humanity. 

These, then, were the traditional ideals, religion as 
materialized and depraved by priest and scribe. Now 
Christ's ideal was essentially different. To them He 
was utterly unintelligible, a person not to be under- 
stood. He lived away in Galilee, remote from the 
city of the religion, and so at first came but seldom 
into conflict with the priests. They could not under- 
stand a person pre-eminent in religion, who would 
not, and did not, frequent the temple according to 
rule and routine and season, and use the sacrifices. 
With the scribes, again, He was in ceaseless collision 
about their weightiest matters of the law, their 
solemn days, their fasts, their feasts, their periods 
of prayer, their tithing mint, anise, and cummin, 
about the formal ways, all so little, yet all so bur- 
densome, in which they thought to do religious 
work. When He went through the fields on the 
Sabbath, and His disciples plucked the ears of corn, 
they thought and spoke as if He had broken the 
whole law of God; and when He opposed to their 
^^Thus saith the fathers, or thus saith tradition," 
His own authority as Son of Man and Lord of the 
Sabbath, they only thought Him guilty of the deeper 
profanity and even the worst blasphemy. He was 
too elevated to be understood of them, and so was 
miunderstood in the gravest degree, and to the 



Tlie Neio Testament in Religion, 141 

most disastrous results. Not to fulfil their ideal was 
to be worthy of the cross. 

2. But while His ideal stood in opposition to 
theirs, see how noble it looks by the contrast. He 
was the Son of Man and the Son of God, and He 
seemed to lie as it were embosomed in the Father's 
arms, feeling as if round His path and about His 
soul, in darkest hour, in supremest moment, the di- 
vine hands watched to guide and to bless. He felt 
at all times at home with God; He lived in God, God 
lived in Him; men felt in His presence as in the 
presence of the Father, because in the presence of 
the only begotten Son. And, note, when He became 
religiously active, what He did, and where He was 
found. Not in the temple, but in the highway, 
where disease was to be cured; in the home where 
wisdom was to be taught; on the sea, and by the 
shore, where men were prepared to listen; at the 
receipt of custom, or in the haunts of the outcast, 
where men were waiting to be saved; there, where 
He could best bring to lost men the great message 
of life, there was He found. And, high though He 
seemed. He gave to no man the sense that He con- 
descended; great though His acts were. His conde- 
scension was never conscious. What He did was 
through the gracious and sweet compulsion of a true 
and holy love. What God is among His worlds, 
Christ was among men. He was the minister of 
God for good to man, come to give His life a ransom 
for many. He was the great Helper of the forlorn, 
the Saviour who seized and uplifted the lowly, and 
carried on His own wearv shoulders the burden of 



142 Religion in History, 

guilt that crushed men to tlie eartli. And what 
feeling did He give them? A new strange feeling, 
making the men who were guilty feel a passion for 
good; He changed the sense of sin in the outcast 
into the sense of sonship, the being beloved of the 
Father and the Son. He loved love into being, and 
commanded by the love He begot. And so the ideal 
of religion He realized was altogether new; it 
needed for its being no priest, no scribe, no temple, 
save the temple of a pure and true spirit and the 
presence of a loving God, no order consecrated and 
set apart to sacerdotal functions and ceremonious 
duties, but only the consecrated spirit of the child 
face to face with the Father. Where love is, the in- 
trusion of a priest is an impertinence, a dark shade 
that sheds coldness into the spirit. And where would 
it have been so impertinent as on the heart and in 
the Spirit of Him who, as Son of Man and Son of 
God, sorrowed in Gethsemane, and died on the 
cross? 

3. As His religion was in deed, so in word. 
What He lived He taught. What He taught He 
lived. Many remarkable elements about that teach- 
ing might here be summarized and described, 
strange, remarkable elements, too. Here is the 
Founder of a religion. Then what does He do? In 
the life He lives He never does a priestly act, or 
gives himself a priestly name, never assumes to- 
w^ards man the attitude, or manifests the temper, or 
falls into the tone of the conventional priest. More, 
He founds His society, and He does not name any man 
He calls to office within it priest, appoints no man to 



The New Testament in Religion. 143 

do any priestly act, institutes no official priesthood, 
simply and purely makes them apostles, or disci- 
ples, or prophets, men who learned, and men who 
taught, or who learned that they might teach. 
When He wishes to impress great duties upon men, 
how does He do it? By parable. And when He 
uses the parable to enforce the highest duty man 
owes to man, where does He get His example, His 
impersonation of love? In the priest and the 
Levite? Nay, in the man they held to be unclean 
and an outcast, the Samaritan. When He wishes to 
express duty to God, the true idea of prayer, where 
does He get His t3q3e? Not from the man who has 
his formula and his book, his regular fasts and his 
legal tithes, but in the publican, who prays out oi 
his stricken conscience, ^^God be merciful to me, a 
sinner." And here the Pharisee, the man of forms, 
stands in the background to make the picture more 
distinct. And when He wishes to find the qualities 
He most praises, where does He find them? Not in 
the old conventional ideal, but in the pure in heart, 
the peacemaker, the lover of righteousness, the suf- 
ferer, the man that mourns. They are the blessed, 
and if He wishes to describe the supreme law of 
God, He finds it in two things, love to God in 
heaven, love to man on earth. On these hang all 
the law and the prophets. Nay, more. He so com- 
bines these, as to make each involve the other, as if 
He meant to say — where perfect love is to God, 
there will perfect love be to man, and where love to 
man, there all the duties God requires will be ful- 
filled. 



144 Religion in History. 

But observe; the maxims^ ethical and moral^ do 
not stand alone. They are part of a vast and im- 
mense system. They are built on a great foundation. 
They rise out of the conception of God^ and His 
relation to man. Tlien^ note, He does not mean the 
people He calls to remain individuals, shut off from 
each other; He associates them in a great kingdom. 
That kingdom is called of heaven: which means, it 
is not like the kingdoms of earth, created by physical 
power, planted by passion or pride — that were 
despotism; but it came from above down into man, 
and must be received freely to be received at all. 
Then He says, it is a kingdom of God. That means, 
it does not come from the act of might or tyranny 
or deception, the ambition of some great man, plant- 
ed on the throne of empire; it was God's, meant to 
be realized in conscience, to show the authority of 
God over the man. The people drawn into that 
kingdom, are drawn into it by the truth, that is, its 
citizens are obedient to the truth by belief of the 
truth. The men that compose it are men that must 
not seek to extend it by sword or persecution, by 
civil law or military power. It is a kingdom of the 
truth, standing, extending, reigning, only through 
the truth and the agencies it employs. Within that 
kingdom, which has no visible form and can know no 
limits of time and place, the faithful and holy men of 
all ages and races are gathered, and, all unconscious- 
ly to themselves, are engaged in a common labour, 
working together with God through His Son in 
building up a new humanity, where, instead of the 
old despotism of force, the new force of divine love 



The New Testament in Religion, 145 

shall reign supreme. That kingdom is an eternal 
ideal ever in process of realization^ never to be per- 
fectly realized. Yet it is all the mightier because it 
is so ideal, because it means that our most perfect 
state is but the shadow of the most perfect possible. 
In the mind of God there lies a pattern according to 
which the new creation is made, and that pattern is 
the kingdom which Jesus instituted, and which His 
people constitute. Within it truth reigns, law rules, 
and obedience is realized. It has come, yet it is 
only coming; when a man has entered it, he is a 
citizen of God's city. Once it is completely realized 
on earth, the will of God will be done here as in 
heaven. 

III. f'' 

But hitherto we have been concerned only with 
the personal religion and ideal of Jesus: yet these 
implied and reposed on certain great truths; Avere, 
indeed, just their articulation or expression in the 
region of reality and life. Now we must descend to 
these truths themselves; it is only througli them 
that we can understand the person and work of 
Christ. I am not going to ask you to discuss the 
high theological doctrine of tlie Godhead, but only 
to consider this — a person and work like Christ's is 
a superstructure, cannot stand on nothing, can be 
there and abide only provided it be built on a founda- 
tion of reality and truth. Now it is not possible 
either to state or discuss what we may call these 
sub-structural truths; but I wish you to look at 
those aspects of them that bear on the idea of 



146 Religion in History. 

religion^ and those questions concerning its action in 
history that are meanwhile before us. The analysis 
and presentation of Christ's personal ideal of reli- 
gion has prepared us for this new discussion. 

1. We shall best begin by returning to our funda- 
mental principle; the idea of the divine is the deter- 
minative idea. A religion always is as its deity iS; or, 
in other words, a man is made by his thought of 
God or what stands in its place. There is no surer 
measure of a people's progress than its successive 
conceptions of the Being it worships. The deities 
of a rude age become little better that the devils of 
an age more refined. The evil power the savage 
propitiates, the sage despises or disbelieves. If, 
therefore, a religion stands rooted in a depraved or 
narrow notion of God, it can never become or con- 
tinue to be the religion of a civilized and progres- 
sive people. The gods the Homeric Greeks believed 
in were abhorrent to the pious men of the Socratic 
schools, to the exalted mind of Xenophanes, to the 
devout spirit of Plato, and the subtle intellect of 
Aristotle. Yet their ideas are to us hardly more 
real than the Homeric. The destiny of ^schylos, 
inevitable, merciless, moving resistless to punish un- 
conscious as well as conscious sin, is a dread power 
from which the heart of the world shrinks, a power 
it could never in its soul worship, but only so soon 
as it had courage repudiate or deny. The God of 
Islam, solitary, severe, stern, inducing man to obey 
by motives that debase, depraving woman, hating 
the infidel, handing him over to the exterminating 
sword, is a fit deity for wild Arabs, or fierce Turks, 



The New Testament in Religion. 141 

but no god for civilized and free man. Even the 
God certain ancient Jews conceived, jealous, angry, 
vengeful, taking pleasure in seeing the little ones of 
the heathen dashed against the stones, is not a 
being that, so conceived, can remain the divine 
sovereign of man. The ultimate and absolute God 
of man must bear on him the mark of no age, no 
place, no race, must stand over all like His own 
heaven, be like it luminous, serene, unsullied, receiv- 
ing the foul breath of earth only to purify it, its 
fragrance only to send it back in holy and gentle 
influences. 

And what is the Christian idea? That God is the 
Father, the Common Father of man, universal, 
everlasting in His love. He hates no child, miscon- 
duct does not create dislike. Love was the end for 
which He made the world, for which He made every 
human soul. His glory is to diffuse happiness, to 
fill up the silent places of the universe with voices 
that speak out of glad hearts. As a Father He 
cannot but be Sovereign, for the patriarch is the 
absolute king. As Sovereign He cannot but enforce 
order, for only thus can the end which is love be ob- 
tained. But He is first Father, then Sovereign, 
anxious to assert His authority, not for the sake of 
the law, but to save His child. Because He made man 
for love He cannot bear man to be lost, rather than 
see the loss fall on man He will suffer sacrifice; sacri- 
fice to Him will become joy when it restores the ruined, 
but loss to man will be absolute, for losing himself he 
loses all. So the great Father loves man in spite of 
his sin, in the midst of his guilt, loves that He may 



148 Religion in History, 

save, and even should He fail in saving, He does not 
cease to love. In the place we call hell eternal love as 
really is as in the place we call heaven, though in the 
one case it is the complacency or pleasure in the holy 
and the happy which seems like the brightness of 
everlasting sunshine or the glad music of waves that 
break into perennial laughter, but in the other it is 
the compassion or pity for the bad and the miserable 
which seems like a face shaded with everlasting 
regret, or the muffled weeping of a sorrow too deep 
to be heard. That grand thought of a God who is 
the eternal and universal Father, all the more regal 
a Sovereign that He is so absolutely Father, can 
never fail to touch the heart of the man who under- 
stands it, be he savage or sage. 

2. But this extraordinary elevation of the idea of 
God could not stand alone, it affected every region 
of thought and feeling. The first thing it touched 
and ennobled was the idea of man. The more divinely 
men thought of God, the m.ore highly they thought 
of man. Into the new conception of God all the 
sublime and strong elements of the old had been 
received, but exalted and softened, made at once 
majestic and gracious. Men at a given stage of 
culture understand severity better than gentleness; 
and so the severer aspect of God came first, because 
the men Moses led out of Egypt could understand it, 
and were more open to the influence of justice than 
of grace. When, by the discipline of history and 
the teaching of prophets, they were better able to 
understand higher conceptions, higher came, but only 
by Him who realized perfect manhood was the perfect 



The Neio Testament in Beligion, 149 

Godhead made known. And the higher the notion 
of God rose, the higher grew the notion of man. 
Man must rightly conceive himself to respect himself, 
and his progress may best be measured by his suc- 
cessive ideas of his own nature. He is to himself, 
the older he gets, only the more mysterious: his 
being is a miniature universe, surrounded with all the 
mysteries of the vaster. We cannot forget that we 
once were not, that we soon shall not be; great 
eternity lies behind, an eternity no less great lies 
before; boundless immensity surrounds us; and we, 
small, self-conscious, rise like marvellous islets of life 
out of the immeasurable reaches of eternity, and feel 
washed by the wide spaces of immensity. Every man 
who has ever speculated much, has stood silent, fear- 
ful, before that thought of himself, feeling as if his 
little self-conscious being trembled like a solitary 
point of light in depths of unfathomable darkness. 
All the great thinkers of antiquity, indeed, of all 
time, have felt the mystery of personal being, and 
have thought of it as holding within it the secret of 
the universe. A great teacher, one who lately passed 
away from us, in one of the many wonderful para- 
graphs of his most characteristic work, has described 
this humanity of ours as ^'Emerging, like a God- 
created, fire-breathing spirit-host, from the Inane; as 
hastening stormfully across the astonished earth, and 
plunging again into the Inane. Earth's mountains 
are levelled and her seas filled up, in our passage; 
can the earth, which is but dead and a vision, resist 
spirits which have reality and are alive? On the 
hardest adamant some footprint of us is stamped in; 



150 Religion in History. 

the last rear of the host will read traces of the earliest 
van. But whence? 0, heaven, whither? Sense 
knows not; faith knows not; only that it is through 
mystery to mystery, from God and to God. " 

"We are such stuff 
As dreams are made on, and our httle Ufe 
Is rounded with a sleep! " 

Now, think of the soft transforming light the 
Christian faith has by its conception of God shed 
upon the idea of man, and the stern mystery of 
human life, its source and destiny. Man is son of 
the Eternal Father, and everlasting son; he is spirit, 
for God is spirit. The thought he incarnates is ever 
seeking the thought incarnated in all material being, 
and working in all historical movements. Man who 
is thought, finding thought all around him, feels in 
the midst of these great infinities at home. But the 
homeliness becomes sweeter and diviner when he 
knows himself a filial spirit, with God as the paternal. 
His eternity becomes our eternity; to sense this 
universe is a dark and insoluble mystery, but to 
spirit that knows God it is light, for He is Light. 
No moment in eternity, no point in space can be 
terrible to the soul that loves to be at home with the 
Eternal, and knows that His home is everywhere and 
every moment. Where the conscious Son is, there 
is the besetting Father. We issued forth from no 
Inane, but from the bosom of Infinite Love; we 
vanish into no Inane, but are received into those 
divine hands that love to hold and welcome the spirit 
that trusts. ^^ Thou hast made us for Thyself, " said 



The New Testament in Religion, 151 

Augustine, '^ and our hearts are restless till they 
repose in Thee. " The heart at peace with God can 
taste no trouble, for it finds all things in all places 
work together for its good. 

3. But now, how are God and man related? The 
simplest duty of the son is love; nothing is more 
beautiful or simple than filial piety. The joy of the 
father is affection, his delight is to secure the happi- 
ness of his child. In the religions of man we see man's 
tendency to God, his search after Him. The search, 
indeed, is often painful, the track is marked with 
blood. In one aspect the study of religions is a most 
humiliating study, because it shows what dark, what 
dismal ideas of Deity, and painful methods of reach- 
ing and pleasing Him liave prevailed among men. 
I often sympathize with the Roman Lucretius, when, 
looking at religion as it was in his day, he spoke of 
it as lowering upon mortals with a hideous aspect, as 
pressing human life down under its inexorable foot. 
For if you look at the way in which man has con- 
ceived God and tried to please Him, you will find it 
hard at times to admire his religion. Take one rite — 
liuman sacrifice. Think what horror and pain must 
have been associated with Deity in the minds of those 
wlio could give the fruit of their body for tlie sin of 
the soul! There is a wondrous Greek tragedy that 
tells how the great hero, Agamemnon, offered up his 
daughter Iphigenia, that he might win from the gods 
a favourable breeze to waft tlie Greek ships to the 
Trojan shore. It was little wonder that the Greek 
poets saw in that sacrifice an act that, while it might 
please Deity, yet offended the moral order of tha 



152 Religion in History. 

universe, and awoke the Eumenides, the dread un- 
slumbering furies, who bring retribution to man. 
Where men seek to please God by outraging heart 
and conscience, religion has become perverted from 
a universal good to the basest evil; and, as I said 
before, human sacrifices were known to almost all 
the old religions, as indeed they are known to many 
heathen worships to-day. Remember the fundamental 
principle, as is the god so is the religion, and you 
will see that human sacrifice but expresses or repre- 
sents the idea of God in these heathen faiths. 

Yet it, no less, represents another idea, man's sense 
of sin, of ill-desert, of inability by character or con- 
duct to please God. There is no sterner fact in 
human experience than the guilty conscience; the 
man who is not saved from it becomes its victim, it 
depraves him and darkens all his world. If his 
religion does not deliver him from it, it debases the 
religion. Yet does not this only the more help us to 
see the miserable ideas of Deity that prevailed among 
the most cultured peoples? They did not think so 
well of God that they could conceive of God saving 
them, pitying and helping them the more for their 
awful consciousness of misery and sin. Instead they 
had to win his favour, win it by pain, by suffering, 
by surrendering to what they most feared the object 
they most loved. If we think of these things need 
we wonder that heathen men should have despised 
their gods and hated religion? 

4. But now see how strangely and beautifully 
changed and dissimilar the Christian notion is. Here 
God does not demand the sacrifice. He makes it; 



The New Testament in Religion, 153 

He does not extort blood, does not delight in suffer- 
ing and death; He gives, and the giving is a passion 
to Him. He so loves the world that He gives for 
its life His only-begotten Son. The great sacrifice 
is one not demanded from man, it is given of God; 
His is the act and His, too, the design to bring man 
home, to win the prodigal, who is still a son, from 
his misery, and shame, and sin, to the light and life 
and love of the Father's house. Under Moses God 
gave the law, and the law came with its severity, the 
dread threatening that every sin had its appropriate 
penalty. But under Christ God gives His love, that 
He may the more completely win man's. The idea 
was a development when viewed in relation to the 
Old Testament religion; but it is a contrast, nay a 
contradiction, to all the other religions man has ever 
professed. It is, indeed, a contradiction that but 
brings out at once the grandeur and the uniqueness 
of the Christian conception. It shows the moral 
energy of God exercised, not in the way of retri- 
bution, but in the way of redemption; it shows the 
sovereign working in the way of the Father, stooping 
unto utmost sacrifice that He might save and restore 
man. 

And the form in which He works this glorious 
redemption is remarkable. It is in His son, in and 
through One who bears the nature of man, and is in 
that nature the image of the invisible God. Deity 
does not dwell remote, aloof, apart from man. He is 
around. He is about. He is within, He has lifted 
human nature into connexion and kinship with the 
Divine. The Son who suffers for us dignifies the 



154 Religion in History. 

nature in Avliich he suffers. In condemning sin He 
exalts humanity; ever since man through Christ 
learned the great secret — the kinship of his humanity 
with Deity^ see how that humanity has risen out of 
the dustj become conscious of the Divine affinities 
within itj and striven towards the realization of its 
more glorious possibilities. 

Thus in the doctrine of the incarnation the great 
truth is implied, that man is bound by kinship, by 
fellowship of nature to the God who is his Father. 
What shows us the descent of God to man, shows us 
also the ascent of man to God; He who came down 
into our humanity, lowly as His outward form seemed, 
has more than all the sages of the world given us an 
idea of our humanity that ennobles each individual 
man. 

IV. 

We must now turn from these beliefs in them- 
selveS; and look at their action in and through the 
Christian religion as it appears in history. We 
have seen Christ's idea of religion in His own 
person, and in His teaching. We have also seen 
the great cardinal beliefs on which it reposed. We 
have now to see how these were or ought to be 
expressed, articulated, and embodied in the Chris- 
tian religion. 

1. And we had better begin this new discussion 
by looking first at their action on the ideal of 
humanity. Now note, Christ created the idea of 
humanity; it was not till He made it; it was His 
creation, He spoke, and it stood up a living thing. 



The New Testament in Religion. 155 

Two great classes of forces, which we may call cen- 
trifugal, had hitherto prevented, as in many places 
they still prevent, the ideal of humanity from being 
realized and understood. The first of these orders 
of forces was the national. Men are divided into 
nations, and nations are divided by race, by lan- 
guage and by religion. The differences of nation 
and race, and language, can be overcome, but differ- 
ences of religion are radical; where they stand, men 
can never meet as brothers. If men differ in colour, 
in blood, and in speech, they may still recognize 
common manhood, but as a matter of history, 
common manhood has never been recof^nized save 
through common religion, and the only common 
religion which has made men recognize their com- 
mon humanity has been that of Christ. 

The second great class of centrifugal forces are so- 
cial, they are caste, rank, blood, class, money, culture 
— all the thousand things that make men of the same 
race, language, and religion feel as if they were yet 
divided into a multitude of separate cliques or sects. 
These divisions find in certain religions their highest 
sanction. The Brahmanism of to-day has no unity 
of worship or of faith, its distinctive characteristic is 
its system of castes, the deep and impassable lines 
by which it distinguishes men who speak the same 
language, and live under the same laws. 

Now the Christian is the only religion that in 
history and in idea has opposed and victoriously con- 
tended against these social, separative, and dis- 
integrative forces. For Islam is in this respect 
secondary and derivative; its universalism but illus- 



156 Religion in History, 

trates and confirms the Christian. The idea of 
Roman citizenship when extended to the provincials 
seemed to create equality, but the fact of Roman 
slavery cancelled and repealed it. The idea of 
humanity could not be created by external machinery, 
like the action of an imperial policy; it could only 
grow out of a conception of man's nature, and the 
relations in which he stood as a whole to the Creator. 
The peculiarity of Christ's action was that it modified 
man from within; it made humanity one by its 
doctrine of God on the one hand, and of human 
sonship on the other. What was the very first thing 
that the greatest of the Christian apostles said to the 
most cultivated of the heathens? '' God hath made 
of one blood all nations of men, for to dwell on all 
the face of the earth." When he addressed the 
Christian communities, what did he say? ^^In 
Christ there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision 
nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor 
free, but Christ is all and in all." And what did 
this mean? The distinctions of race had perished 
before the universal religion; at its bidding humanity 
stood forth as one, a brotherhood. So the unity of 
man meant fraternity; men who were sons of God, 
who called God Father, were brothers. Brother- 
hood necessarily involved equality; where frater- 
nity reigned, slavery could have no place, the sons 
of the free home must themselves be free. With 
freedom there came the right of man to seek God, 
to speak to Him, to live according to the will He 
revealed in His word and to the conscience; and 
therefore the right men call of private judgment, 



The Neio Testament in Religion. 15t 

the right to think and speak the thoughts man 
holds most true. But where men were conceived 
to be one, a brotherhood, equal and free, there the 
duty emerged of common love and common service. 
The men God loved, man was bound to love, where 
He willed good, man was bound to do it; without 
love of man no love of God was possible, without 
service of man there could be no service which God 
approved. 

Out of this ideal grew the great notion of a divine 
society, humanity organized into a city or state that 
should perfectly express and realize the will of God. 
The Christian ideal or thought of the city of God 
had no parallel in any religion or system of antiquity. 
Had I time I would sketch for you the greatest ideal 
of a perfect society known to the ancient world, — 
perhaps, outside Christ, the greatest ideal known to 
the modern, — the dream Plato incarnated in his 
^^ Republic." Were it possible I could have wished 
to unsphere the spirit of Plato, and call him from 
those worlds that hold 

"The immortal mind that hath forsook 
Her mansion in this fleshly nook," 

that he might teach us how he, the greatest of the 
Greeks, conceived and would realize the ideal state. 
Think where he lived, in the fairest land of antiquity, 
under the brightest sun, amid the most cultivated 
people, pupil of the greatest teacher and philosopher 
of his race, associated with the wisest statesmen, heir 
to an heroic past, moved by a poetry that is still the 
joy of the scholar, and then conceive him turning in 



158 Religion in History, 

his maturest manhood to think out the model of a 
perfect republic. And what was it? It was a state 
where there was to be little freedom, for philosophers 
were to be kings — and a strange king the philosopher 
always makes, for he is a man resolute to fit men 
into his theory, and his best theory is, you may be 
well assured, a bad frame for the simplest man. 
And the state these philosophers were to rule was 
to be one where the home was destroyed, where 
women were to be held in common, where there was 
to be a community of goods, where life was to be 
regulated by rules and hard fixed methods that 
would have allowed no elasticity, no play for glad 
and spontaneous energy. That Republic could not 
have been realized without the ruin of humanity, and 
was possible at its best only for the Greek, was con- 
ceived in derision of the barbarian, and afforded even 
to Greek nature only the poorest exercise. 

Turn now to the ideal Christ created. It lifted 
all men, through its doctrine of God and the Redeemer, 
into a unity that was a brotherhood, and involved an 
equality of rights on the one hand and a sovereignty 
of duty on the other. It left the mother and the 
wife and the daughter to make glad and enlarge the 
spirit of the husband and the father, to evoke and 
ennoble the soul of the son. It left the man to be 
while the citizen, the husband, while the husband, 
the brother of his kind, the servant in his age of the 
everlasting God. It left the state where it stood, but 
it changed all the citizens, ennobled them, made them 
simpler, truer men; and through this change of the 
men altogether changed the state. It aimed at the 



The New Testament in Eeligion, 159 

good of all^ through seeking the good of each, by- 
blessing the one it laboured to bless the many. 
Whatever meant misery to man the Christian was to 
relieve, whatever meant wrong he was to redress. 
They say that Christ has nothing to do with ques- 
tions of state; what concerns the conduct of nations 
or of peoples does not concern Him. No saying less 
true could any man utter; all questions of state, all 
social and civil politics are to me questions of religion. 
And such they must be to the man who wishes to 
realize on earth the kingdom of God. Xever, while an 
abuse tarries, while a hate re'gns, while a barbarism 
remains unconquered, never, while ignorance broods 
with its dark and jealous wing over the mind of man, 
while injustice or unequal law or disorder or wrong 
live on earth can the Christian man be still or 
inactive in the arena of public life. All without as 
within us must be brought into harmony with the 
great law of Christ, and only as the harmony of the 
renewed spirit is reflected in the renewed humanity 
will the glorious dream of the city of God be realized. 
2. This brings us, secondly, to Christ's method of 
realizing the ideal of humanity. His method, indeed, 
is very simple, but it is remarkable in its strength. 
That method does not proceed by ignoring the 
hardest and most painful facts of our human experi- 
ence. Christ was open-eyed as regards the actual state 
of our nature and world. He knew it was miserable, 
altogether evil, but He did not mean to skin the sore. 
He said, as He laid His finger on the evil, ^' This sore 
must be healed, sin is, and sin must be vanquished." 
No religion has so great a sense of sin and at the 



160 Beligion in History. 

same time of salvation. The sense of sin indeed is 
almost shared in its intensity bj another than the 
religion of Christy that of Buddha. Buddha was a 
beautiful spirit, a character of rare pity and gentle- 
ness, touched to his inmost soul by sorrow for sin, 
and at the sight of human misery. And his whole 
system was inspired with the desire to deliver man 
from the sorrow he hated — but how deliver him? 
By freeing him from being, by bringing him to a 
death that was annihilation. He saved men, by 
destroying man, and he magnified sin that he might 
only the more pour contempt on life. But what of 
Christ? His sense of sin had for background His 
exalted ideal of man; it was because man was so 
noble that his sin was so terrible. And what did 
He aim at? Yanquishing the sin but saving the 
man. If you throw away a life that 3^ou may deliver 
from disease, what does it mean but that you do not 
care for the person whose life it is. But if you die 
to conquer the disease and save the person, does it 
not mean that your hatred of disease is only the 
reverse side of your love for life? Christ's aversion 
to sin but expresses His love of man, and the glorious 
peculiarity of His method was this — while He van- 
quished the sin He saved the man. 

It is well to look at Christ's peculiarity in this 
matter. Men in face of sin may be divided into 
various classes. There is the Cynic; he is a common 
person in these days; our clubs make him; they 
are great factors of cynicism. Where amid much 
comfort you can talk scandal, indulge wit, and 
derive comfort from the scorn in which you hold 



The New Testament in Religion. 161 

weaker men — it is easy and natural to be a cynic. 
The cynic has ever risen in clays like these, he was 
in Christ's time and before it, as he is now, and said 
then as he says now, ' ' What a poor thing is man ! 
A compound of meanness and vanity, and whether 
his meanness or his vanity be most to be despised, 
it is hard to tell, yet were it not for this compound, 
what should be have to laugh at, what to make life 
pleasant?" The cynic little dreams that in so de- 
spising man, he but shows himself despicable. Yet 
it is ever so; the faultiest men quickly see and 
severely condemn their own faults when reflected in 
another's face. 

Then there is the Epicurean, the man who loves 
pleasure, who liates alike the thought and the 
experience of pain. To be burdened with a sense of 
man's misery, is but to have his own pleasure marred, 
and so he says: ^' Why trouble ourselves about a state 
we cannot mend; man will be foolish; let him be a 
fool, while we here can at least make our own lives 
pleasant, and so lessen the pain of humanity by secur- 
ing and enlarging our own happiness." 

Then there is the Stoic, who believes in the 
'sanity of Nature and the sufficiency of man to 
obey the laws contained within it. And so he 
speaks thus: ^^ Virtue is beautiful, the man Avho is 
not virtuous is a creature to be pitied; he belongs to 
the lowest type of men, for he contradicts and defeats 
the nature by virtue of which he is Man. But our 
virtue is our own, evolved by our own action from 
within ourselves; let us cultivate virtue, and so, by 
showii>g its beaut}^ make it attractive, only let our 



162 Beligion in History, 

calm never be broken by the restless passion that 
would suffer for the evil. The weaker must alwa3's 
be^ but to the stronger they ought only to be condi- 
tions for the exercise of his calmer strength." 

These are the criticisms of selfishness^ the doctrines 
of impotence. Yirtue that will not suffer to save 
man, is but decent vice. There is no parsimony so 
miserable as the one whose chief concern is personal 
happiness. But even men of these types have often, 
especially under the influence of Christian ideals, 
become zealous doers of good, helpers of humanity, 
and let us give all honour to men ruled, even though 
they may not know it, by the Spirit of Christ, who 
follow Him in any degree even while they do not 
honour His name. 

But observe Christ's peculiarity; He stood alone, 
and His religion stands alone here — He was a 
Kedeemer, His religion is a religion of redemption. 
It sees sin, and it hates sin, but to it every sinner 
is a man that may be saved. To save him Christ 
lived and died, to save him the Spirit of God works 
and wills, to save him every good man ought to 
labour and to watch. The passion of Christ is the 
symbol of His religion, it suffers everywhere for the 
sin of humanity, but in order to the deliverance of 
the humanity that has sinned. The state of estrange- 
ment from God, God wills to change into a state of 
reconciliation, and the religion of Christ is the means 
that works it; and it is of all the religions the only 
one that is in the true and proper sense a religion 
of redemption. 



The New Testament in Religion, 163 

V. 

Now, the thing that chiefly concerns us about 
this religion of redemption, is the way in which it 
affects the personal and collective life of man. 

1. Well, then, mark how it restores the depraved 
nature into the image of its Creator, and makes it as 
redeemed a vehicle of the Divine purposes, a factor of 
the order and ends of God. Now I would just note 
three simple historical facts in relation to Christ's 
redemptive action. He Las proved Himself in His 
handling of men possessed of three great powers. 
First: an unparalleled power to change men, to make 
"bad men good. Secondly: an unparalleled power to 
make the men He has reformed into factors of good 
— agents of redemption. Thirdly: an unparalleled 
power to associate the men He has redeemed into 
societies with larger ideas than the states of earth, 
societies with an ideal and mission of their own, 
or rather, one tliat is altogether His. In proof 
of His possession of these gifts I would appeal to 
history. I ask you this : Where will you find three 
men who have more profoundly affected the history 
of the world than Peter, Paul and John? What were 
they? Peter, when Jesus found him, was an ignorant, 
impulsive, superstitious fisherman, plying his craft on 
the sea of Galilee, without thought or vision of the 
greater world around. John was a brother fisherman, 
rather more cultivated and refined perhaps, yet with 
hardly more promise of capability and power. Paul, 
when Jesus found him, was a tentmaker, poor, mean 
in bodily appearance, possibly painful to look at, 



164 Religion in History. 

certainly no person a passer-by would have selected as 
a manifest king of men. But just see what these 
three men, coming under the influence of Christ, be- 
came and did. Peter conducts himself before priests 
and rulers like a statesman, founds and administers 
churches with the wisdom of a far-seeing ruler of 
men. John writes the most marvellous history on 
record, serenest, clearest, profoundest^ fullest of in- 
sight into the secret springs of life and action in God, 
tenderest in the delicate portraiture of the Christ he 
knew, most awful and graphic in its description of 
the men that plotted his death, and accomplished it. 
Paul becomes the author of Epistles that command 
the mind, that have made and governed the thought 
of the cultivated peoples of these Christian centuries. 
And these three are but typical. In every age 
this marvellous power that Christ possesses has stood 
expressed and declared in great persons. The creative 
personalities of the Christian centuries are of Christ's 
making, and as He made the persons, so He has 
ruled their conduct and their lives. The order of his- 
tory since He lived has been an order He has guided, 
especially in all that has made for human grace 
and good. He who has been so able to change 
men and make them factors of good for man has 
indeed been proved by transcendent fact our great 
Redeemer. 

2. What I think of the action of Christian men 
and societies in history will in later lectures become 
apparent. But let the creative personalities of the 
Christian centuries, the men with a passion for the 
good of man, witness to the distinctive power of 



The Neiv Testament in Religion. 165 

Christ. In Himself we see what He means man to 
be to man; in the men He has formed, who have 
lived under the inspiration of His love, we see the 
sort of service He has rendered to humanity in 
history, one of the ways in which He has ameliorated 
our common lot. Deeds are greater than words. 
Men may find parallels to sayings of the New Testa- 
ment in Confucius or in Buddha, in Plato or in 
Seneca, but one thing they cannot parallel, the 
achievements of Christ in the region of human 
personalities. Here He has been the Supreme 
Creator, one who dwells altogether alone. Do not 
think that Buddha can stand by His side. The 
person so named was, as I have said, a gentle and 
beautiful human character, oppressed by the sense of 
human suffering, laden with sorrow at the thought of 
the miserable and illusive life to which man was 
doomed; but he had not the love of life that turned 
all man's moral energies into forces that worked for 
its amelioration. Buddha so hated life as to ex- 
tinguish the very desire to mend it; Christ so loved 
life as to create in all who loved Him the desire for 
its ennoblement. The men who have most imitated 
Buddha have preached a gospel of annihilation; the 
men w^ho have best known Christ have preached a 
gospel of salvation, of grace that reigns through 
righteousness unto eternal life. The aim of Buddha 
was to make men know their misery that they might 
be willing to lay down the burden of existence, but 
the purpose of Christ was to make men conscious of 
sin that they might live unto holiness, forsake the 
darkness and seek the light. To Buddha the highest 



166 Religion in History, 

life was the secluded, the renunciation of the fami- 
liar duties of society and the home; but to Christ the 
holiest life was the life of active beneficence, the 
piety that helped our neighbour, that honoured God 
by serving man. The secret of His power was His 
love of man; the men that love Him must love as 
He loved, and so translate into the realities of 
personal character and social conduct the health, the 
holiness, the wholeness of His glorious ideal. 

3. I know there are men in England who use base 
words when they speak of our Christianity. It is 
to you, working men, that they make their appeal. 
Now, in matters of this kind, Ave can only concern 
ourselves with men who use honourable and veracious 
speech; with those whose language is but buffoon- 
ery, and the brutal buffoonery of poltoons, we can 
have no concern whatever. The great heart of the 
world is just, and, turning from the ignorant and ran- 
corous men, who fight with the poisoned weapons of 
savages or slaves, I cry across the ages to the mighty 
spirits of the Christian centuries, '^ What think ye of 
Christ? " The poets, led by the great Florentine, 
the man of sad, lone spirit, of face so beautiful, yet 
so full of wondrous thought, who imagined the 
strange circles of the Inferno^ and yet saw as in 
open vision the celestial ^^ Mount of light," while 
Chaucer, in his quaint English guise, and Shake- 
speare, ^' Fancy's sweetest child," and Milton, whose 
voice had a sound as of the sea, and Cowper, and 
Coleridge, and Wordsworth, and many another 
bright spirit follow in his train — make answer, ^^ He 
was the soul of our poetry, our inspiration, and our 



Tlie Neiv Testament in Religion. 16T 

joy." ^^What think ye of Christ?'' we ask men 
of thought^ and out of the middle ages rise the 
schoohnen whose mighty intellects made light in its 
darkness, the founders of Modern Philosophy, 
Descartes, and Bacon, and Locke, the foremost 
minds of the eighteenth century, the century of 
unbelief, Leibnitz, and Xewton, and Berkeley, 
and Kant; the thinkers, too, that in sheer intel- 
lectual force transcend all the other men of this 
century of conscious wisdom, Schelling and Hegel, 
and they altogether confess and acknowledge ^ ^ the 
Christ stands alone, pre-eminent, only Son of God 
among men." '^ What think ye of Christ?" we ask 
the great philanthropists, the men who have made 
our laws kindlier while more just to the criminal, our 
prisons more wholesome while more deterrent of 
crime, who have accomplished the liberation of the 
slave, who have made us conscious of our duties to 
savage peoples abroad and to our lapsed at home; 
the men who in these centuries have been foremost 
in doing good and in guiding to nobleness the mind 
of man, and Bernard and Francis of Assisi, John 
Howard and ^Irs. Fry, Wilberforce and Livingstone, 
surrounded by the noble band of all our good 
Samaritans, answer with one accord, ^^ Without Him 
we should have been without our inspiration and our 
strength, the love of man and the hatred of wrong 
that have constrained us to our work. " ^ ^ What think 
ye of Christ? " we cry to the great masters of music 
and song, who have woven for us the divine speech of 
the Oratorio, and filled the air with harmonies grander 
than any nature has known, and they for answer but 



168 Religion in History, 

bid us read the names of their supreme works, 
^^ Messiah," ^^St. Paul," ''Redemption," and know 
that but for Christ the one art in which the modern 
has far transcended the ancient world would never 
have been. ' ' What think ye of Christ? " we ask the 
painters who have made the canvas live with their 
ideals of love and holiness, pity and suffering; the 
sculptors who have chiselled the shapeless marble 
into forms so noble as to need only speech to be the 
living man made perfect; and their great leaders, 
from famed Giotto through Fra Angelico to Michael 
Angelo and Raphael, down to our own Reynolds and 
Ruskin, send forth the response, ''He has been the 
soul of our art, our dream by night, our joy by day, 
to paint Him worthily were the highest, though, 
alas, most hopless feat of man." 0, yes; thou Christ 
the Redeemer, Son of God yet Son of Man, stand 
forth in Thy serene and glorious power, Leader of 
our progress. Author of all our good, ideal and in- 
spiration of all our right and righteousness, and 
reign oyer the hearts and in the lives of men ! 



LECTURE IV. 

THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION IN THE FIRST FIFTEEN 
CENTURIES OF ITS EXISTENCE. 

What we have to attempt this evening is to study 
the action of the religion of Christ in the first fifteen 
centuries of its existence. That is an immense sub- 
ject, quite suflflcient in itself to awe and oppress 
any one's spirit. To make the attempt to discuss or 
describe it in an hour's discourse, is certainly to ex- 
hibit a courage more allied to adventure than to 
discretion. What, too, is intended, is the more 
difficult, as we must attempt to get below the sur- 
face at the underlying principles or causes, that we 
may the better discover their nature, their action, 
and their end. 

It w^ere easy to write or to tell the history of a 
Church, but it is not so easy to describe the history 
of a Religion. Yet, to the partial, or partisan, or 
careless historian, or to the designing polemic, these 
are identical, to be treated as one and the same. 
Here they are to be held as throughout distinct; as 
though often blended in action, yet as different as are 
form and matter. It is needful that we see that what 
runs back into Christ, or follows by necessary conse- 



170 Religion in History, 

qiience from Him, ami from the circle of truths He 
created, and whose centre He is, is of the essence of 
the Christian Religion; but what springs from the 
needs, the ambitions, the interests of any Christian 
Society, is the Society's alone. 

I do not stand here as the apologist of any church, 
least of all those of churches that to me, in many 
points, fundamentally misconceive and misinterpret 
the very idea, as in many respects they have per- 
verted and depraved the reality, of the religion of 
Christ. What I wish to do is simply this, to see how 
that religion has acted in history, how it has affected 
the happiness, the progress, the wellbeing of society 
and of man. In the nineteen centuries of its exist- 
ence, it has furnished, on the most stupendous scale, 
experimental proof of its intrinsic character, contents, 
and qualities. In spite of manifold and most burden- 
some impedimenta, it has changed everything, man 
most of all; and every change it has, as a religion, 
worked, has worked altogether for good. We know 
what the world was when Christianity entered it, we 
know what it is to-day, and at every moment between 
then and now, we can trace the history and action of 
the great Christian ideas or truths, now acting in 
secret, now openly, now receiving the merciless hate 
of a mighty empire, now collecting, directing, pene- 
trating, as with the passion of God, the concentrated 
enthusiasms of peoples. And if we are to understand 
matters aright, we must compare what was with what 
is, and find in what w^^y Christianity has worked to 
change what was into what is; and only when that 
has been done, can we be in a position to answer the 



Religion in First Fifteen Centuries. 171 

question — has it acted in the common life of man as 
a divine religion ought to act? have its fruits been 
but the apples of Sodom, or have they been indeed 
living grapes from the living vine planted in the 
paradise of God? 

I hope it is not necessary to restate the purpose of 
these lectures. They were intended, not to deal with 
doubt on the one hand, or doctrine on the other, but 
simply to exhibit the action of religion in history, 
Avith a view to discover its true relation to the great 
economical, industrial, and political problems that 
interest the working men of to-day. This is a work 
which I think you have a right to ask from the men 
who study and teach the religion of Jesus Christ. 
Here are Christian men and churches faced with 
Nihilism, Socialism, Secularism, and many another 
form of negation, or passionate unbelief, often more 
remarkable for the intensity of its bigotry and the 
density of its ignorance than any other quality be- 
sides. I have meanwhile no wish to deal with these 
as a critic on the one hand, or an apologist on the 
other. It were an easy thing to grapple with their 
assumptions and their ignorance, and handle them 
after the manner of the apologetical protagonist. 
But my purpose is quite other. If they are, icliii 
are they? There is a reason for their being. Have 
they not in this and other lands been born of disa]> 
pointed hopes? Men have a right to expect that 
religion, as Christian religion, shall cure poverty, 
shall make the charity that is at once the luxury of 
the rich and the misery of the poor, cease; shall 
bring a time when wealth, equally distributed, shall 



172 Religion in History, 

create the happiest of civil and social and secular 
states. And much of our Nihilism and our Socialism 
has been born of disappointed hopes, and hopes that 
were legitimate. And the Christian churches, if 
they are wise, will not simply play the part of apolo- 
gist, and say to these people, '• ^ How false and futile 
are your beliefs, ill-considered, inconsequent, incoher- 
ent, formed without knowledge, maintained without 
science, a bundle of mere illiterate dogmatisms;" 
but, though, unhappily, all this may be true, they 
will say, ^^ We are to blame for these crude negations; 
they are the children of our neglect, the Nemesis 
that has followed on the heels of our unfulfilled 
duties. They do not represent the rebellion of rea- 
son, but it is a rebellion with a reason, for it has not 
been caused by dislike to the truth of God, but by 
the inaction or impotence of His churches." Then, 
turning to the great and fruitful idea of religion, 
the vital truths and realities of faith, they will ask, 
^^ What do they mean for life? what message have 
they to the multitudes of men who toil and spin, and 
how are we to build up in the world, and in view of 
man and mankind, a state, a society that, in all its 
parts, shall express and declare the great ideal of a 
city of God, a society in harmony with His spirit 
and mind ? " 

Now, my attem.pt hitherto has been to bring out 
the principles and qualities in religion as an idea, 
and in the religions of the Old and the New Testa- 
ments, creative of a happier order, contributory to a 
wealthier state, and a more progressive society; and 
I wish to-night, to try to discover how the Christian 



Religion in First Fifteen Centuries. 1T3 

religion^ even in its earliest birth, has affected these 
same great forces, and worked towards these great 
purposes and ends. 

Let me begin then, by simply stating that it is 
here necessary to look at the Christian religion from 
three points of view. 1. As regards some of the dis- 
tinctive notes or qaalities it possessed at its birth, or 
on its appearance in the world. 2. At the way in 
which the Christian societies were affected by certain 
old Pagan and Judaic ideas; and 3. At the way in 
which, in spite of these, the Christian truths or ideas 
so worked through the Christian Societies as to affect 
for good the common life of man, our industrial and 
economical systems, and our toiling men and multi- 
tudes. 



Now, you will note, beginning with the first, that 
Christianity at its birth stood a centre of new ideas, 
a circle of great and splendid beliefs. Some of these, 
cardinal and central for our question, were exhibited 
in the previous lecture. Those meant specially con- 
cerned the new ideas of God, of man, and of the 
•method of reconciling God and man. These were 
such as to make man the glorious vehicle or organ 
for fulfilling or carrying out to completion the divine 
purpose or plan in history. Growing directly out 
of those ideas, or truths, or beliefs, came these 
qualities : — 

1. Christianity was a universal, not a national 
religion. As universal, it was something generically 
new, absolutely unlike all that had been before, or 



174 FieUgioJi in History. 

were around. A universal religion is a religion 
capable of living anywhere and everywhere, suited 
to men of all classes and in all stages of their 
development, capable of satisfying the largest, yet 
of stooping to the meanest nature; yet able so to fill 
the nature as to make it dissatisfied with its attain- 
ment, ever craving after something nobler and higher. 
X universal is more than a missionary religion. It 
must be missionarj', but all missionary are not 
universal religions. Buddhism is missionary, yet we 
can see this, that it so hates life, it so hates society, 
it so dislikes whatever tends to create an order that 
shall prolong and lift the life of humanity, as to act 
as a sort of paralysis of progress, as to produce a 
sort of general collapse in all the more progressive 
and ameliorative agencies of time. Islam is mission- 
ary, but then it spreads not simply by power, but 
so as to deprave the civilized, as to lower the higher 
and nobler races. A universal religion must be one 
that can help man ever forward, enlarge his nature, 
give him for ever the idea that far as he has come he 
has yet an infinite path to travel to a higher and 
nobler perfection. 

Now the universalism of Christianity rose out of 
its cardinal ideas. The one God made mankind one. 
One God and one humanity could be expressed only 
by one religion. Now, mark, that was at first an un- 
intelligible idea. To the early world all religions 
were local. Zeus could not be understood out of 
Greece, Jupiter could not be understood out of Rome. 
The Roman might carry his faith with him, but it 
was bound up with the being of his state, with the 



Religion in First Fifteen Centuries. 1T5 

idea of his city. jSTo man can be a Brahman out of 
India. If he comes here he loses so much of his 
Brahmanism that he has to be purged and purified 
at his return. There was not then^ as there is not 
now, any religion, but the religion of Christ that 
possessed universalism, that could be anywhere by 
any man believed and obeyed, and tliat tended to 
embrace all men in a glorious unity. That made it 
a most insoluble problem, a strange anomaly, to men 
possessed of the older ideas, and many a great 
historian and thinker stood puzzled and helpless 
before the notion that a faith could be universal, that 
there could be a religion expressing faith in one God, 
one Humanity, and one great Mediator between 
them. 

2. The second distinctive note was spiritual. It 
was purely spiritual, alike as regards its matter and 
its independence of all outer and local forms. Every 
old religion, as has been explained, had its temples, 
its priests, its hierarcliy, its augurs, its processions, 
its sacrifices, the varied signs and symbols by which 
externally it lived. But now here was the wonderful 
anomaly. Christ was no priest, appointed no man a 
priest, erected no temple, established no ritual, laid 
dovv^n no law of sacrifice, enjoined no sacrifice but 
the sacrifice of clean hands and a pure heart, a holy 
and noble life unto God. iS'ow its independence of 
all sacerdotal forms made His religion a greater 
anomaly than its Pounder, more wonderful, less in- 
telligible. That it should be without a priest, with- 
out a priesthood, without an altar, without a temple 
for a home, made it seem to the ancient Greeks, 



176 Religion in History, 

Romans, and Jews, a religion? — nay, an atheism, an 
utter denial of all religious belief. And so, why 
were the Christians condemned to the lions? Why 
were they forced to the amphitheatre? They were 
said to be Atheists, men profane, without God, while 
in truth, they were so spiritually religious that the 
unspiritual religions could not understand them. And 
bigoted, intolerant, as all heathen religions were, the 
Roman doomed the Christians, as men godless and 
atheistic, to the stake. 

But not only so; the religion was independent 
of all political organizations, all hierarchical and 
graduated orders. By that I mean this — the polities 
now thought so cardinal to the religion had no 
existence in its purest and most historical form, the 
primitive state of the religion as it issued from the 
mind of its Founder and the hands of His apostles. 
Men say, Christianity is papacy. IS'ay, papacy was 
fatal to many things in the cardinal Christian idea. 
The father is an excellent authority when his family 
are children; but once the family is grown they must 
not be treated as infants. Papacy making men 
spiritual infants stands in the way of the realization 
of the highest Christian idea, which is essentially the 
religion of manhood, and speaks to men as men. ' 
And as with papacy, so with all hierarchical forms. 
They were later, they did not belong to the early 
Church. The earliest was a society where men 
taught, men learned and lived, each after his OAvn 
kind. The man who believed became a member of 
Christ. Becoming a member of Christ, he became a 
worker for man; and those little communities that 



Religion in First Fifteen Centuries, 11? 

rose in those ancient cities that stood round the tide- 
less Mediterranean, what were thev, every one of 
them, but missionary societies formed of men who 
lived in the most devoted way for man, to cure his 
sorrow, to heal his misery, to help his sin, to bring 
all into holier relations to God? The abolition of the 
old sacerdotalism was the creation of a grand 
spiritual religion formed from heaven. 

3. That brings us to the third great quality. 
The religion was a religion creative and regulative 
of a new life, both individual and collective. Xow, 
as has been stated over and over again, the ancient 
religions did not pretend to give amoral law, directive 
of personal and social and civil life. The moralist 
was never the priest, he was always the philosopher. 
No man did good because his religion bound him. 
No, it was only the maxims of the schools that could 
direct and teach. If you want to find the highest 
ideal of morality in Pagan times, where do you go? 
Certainly not to the oracles, certainly not to the 
mysteries, certainly not to the priesthoods. Nay, 
but you go to the academy, to the porch, or to the 
grove, and say to Plato, or Zeno, or Aristotle, 
^^ Teach me how to regulate my life.'" And as there 
was no morality connected with the religion, so the 
gods did not concern themselves about morality. A 
Pagan moralist could say, ^^The gods give me life 
and fortune, but a cheerful, contented spirit I secure 
for myself.'' Or he could say, ^^ The gods send war 
and pestilence, and we offer sacrifices to propitiate 
their wrath; but the virtuous man is sufficient for 
himself, he needs no help of the gods." 



178 Religion in History, 

Now the result was inevitable; where religion had 
no concern with morality, morality could draw from it 
no inspiration. But when Christ appeared, these 
were bound together in indissoluble marriage, the 
highest moral principle a«nd the highest religious 
faith were united in eternal alliance. And the result 
was seen at once; first in this: man was placed in 
the centre of new moral forces, new moral forces 
were placed within the man. Then happened a 
wonderful thing. Where the schools had been power- 
less, Christianity became powerful, and men who 
never felt the inspiration to a good and noble life 
felt it now. 

And, as a second result, the virtues were univer- 
salized. If you had Avished to scandalize an ancient 
philosopher, j'ou could not have done it more efiectu- 
ally than by associating him with the unlettered, with 
the people. Celsus, the great assailant of the Christian 
faith, held up the Christians to scorn because they 
were unlettered men, slaves, cobblers, weavers, men 
who were not equal to stand in an Academy, or speak 
in elegant Greek. But therein lay its power, it took 
the poor, the outcast, the despised, and it made them 
more moral than the schools had made the philo- 
sophers. You will get many a beautiful proverb in 
Seneca, you will get many a fine ethical principle in 
Plato, you will find in Stoicism some of the most 
exalted precepts that human ethics have ever known. 
But mark you one thing, you will never discover that 
these elevated the common life of man, affected the 
course of lust, made the bad good, or the impure 
holy. Where they failed, Christ succeeded with 



Religion in First Fifteen Centuries, 1T9 

splendid, glorious success; He made out of the very 
outcasts men that became saints to God. 

And then followed a third thing. Virtues new 
and beautiful were created. Xow I don't mean to 
compare the Greek ^' Eros/' the Latin ^^ Amor/' and 
the Christian ^^Love." The man who knows classic 
life knows that the distance between these is an in- 
finite distance. Love, what did it signify to the 
ancient world but a form of lust, or what at best 
carried with it every connotation of passion and its 
pain? But Love, what does it become to Christian 
man? Read that wonderful chapter which stands as 
the xiii. of first Corinthians, the glorious descrip- 
tion of Christian love, the power that can inspire, 
can regulate, can ennoble man, making him live for 
his fellows the wide world over. Or take another 
thing, take the tenderness it brought into life, of 
man to woman, of strong to weak. There is no 
grander ancient character than Socrates, beautiful 
character he is in many a way. He, citizen, 
thinker, teacher, plying that wondrous dialectic 
craft of his in the streets of Athens, is a form 
attractive to all eyes. And he is so attractive be- 
cause he stands out from among the crowd the 
creator of a new moral ideal, at once stronger, 
higher, and more humane than the old epic and 
heroic ideal embodied in the Homeric Achilles. 
But now, look how over against him stands the 
image of Xanthippe, his wife. She has had hard 
measure dealt to her; his contemporaries and his- 
torians have made her seem one who led the poor 
philosoplier a hardish life, and have made her the 



180 Bellgion in History. 

tj'pe of a Avoman who makes life not pleasant to the 
man that has wedded her. And many a dry-as- 
dust commentator has grown somewhat humorous 
over the sweet relief that death brought to Socrates 
when it saved him from Xanthippe. 

But if you examine the simple truth as it stands in 
history^ that woman has no right to be so rated; the 
man, on the other hand, reason to be rated most 
soundly. His love is all for the state and not for the 
home, marriage is for him only a convenient institu- 
tion, carrying with it no duties of living affection, of 
mutual helpfulness and cheerful intercourse, and his 
conduct was but too good an exponent of his 
opinions. He cultivated an admiring friendship for 
Aspasia, but he had only the coldest neglect for poor 
Xanthippe. His duties are all to Athens and Greece, 
and not at all to home. He puns, questions, teaches 
for the good of philosophy and the state, but she has 
to provide for their children. She goes to him in 
the hour of death, grieved, distressed in a woman's 
way, and he sits as in the Phaedo, sublimely dis- 
coursing with his friends. When she comes he never 
feels a bit the loss to her, they do not feel the pain 
to the woman and to the children; nay, it is going 
to trouble the serenity of the philosopher to see the 
woman who was his wife, and the children she had 
borne him. And they send her away with no word 
of comfort, with scorn rather than with cheer. 
There now stands out clear and distinct one of 
the great differences the religion of Christ brought 
in, it brought in the spirit of love, made the weak 
dependent on the strong, made the strong thought- 



Religion in First Fifteen Centuries. 181 

ful of the Aveak, made the man in his might, in his 
manhood, with all the rights of manhood upon him, 
be to the weak generous, and to the dependent 
noble. There is but one phase of its action in univer- 
salizing and creating a higher virtue, and so purify- 
ing and perfecting the Avhole notion of society. 
The state of life built up in harmony with these prin- 
ciples, according to these great ideals, could not but 
be a kindlier, nobler, humaner state. 

4. Imagine, then, Christianity launched on the 
stream. It has those features we have sketched, 
and how has it to live and do its work? By means 
of the preacher, the teacher, the man that persuades 
the reason. That, too, made it something new. A 
man like Gibbon has represented the old religions as 
tolerant. I stand here to say that no ancient religion 
was tolerant, or could be tolerant. It was in the 
heart of it a narrow nationalism, and it could allow 
to live within the nation only the men that supported 
it. Why was Socrates done to death? Religion, as 
the ancients understood it, persecuted him thereto. 
Or why was Protagoras banished from Athens, in 
spite of the friendship and protection of Pericles, the 
most illustrious statesman of Athens in her most 
illustrious age? Because he had ventured, in a 
treatise on the gods, to say, ^ ^ I do not know whether 
the gods do or do not exist." To express such a 
doubt was to become liable to the last penalty; and 
Protagoras preferred exile to death. But, perhaps, 
you may think Rome better than Greece. Well, 
take Maecenas, the man Horace so greatly praises, 
and get at his advice to Augustus. What does he 



182 Beligion in History. 

say ? He tells Augustus that whatever he tolerates he 
is not to tolerate alien religions, he is not to allow his 
people to break from the ancient faith. But it may 
be thought, this man was no true Roman and lover of 
liberty, rather he was the friend and admirer of the new 
emperor, advising him how best to found a despotism 
on the ruins of the ancient freedom. Let us appeal, 
then, to Cicero, and we find him in his treatise on 
Laws saying, that no man shall be allowed to worship 
any gods except those publicly recognized by law; 
or let us ask the distinguished Roman jurist, Julius 
Paulus, what he understands to be the law on this 
matter? and he explicitly enough answers, ^^ Who- 
ever introduces new and unknown religions, by which 
the minds of men may be disturbed, are, if belonging 
to the higher ranks, to be banished, but if to the lower, 
they are to receive the penalty of death." These 
principles of Roman law made the persecution of the 
Christians not only legal, but necessary; and they 
stood associated with the fundamental idea and 
condition of the Roman state. To doubt the state 
religion, was to doubt the right of the state to be, 
its right to make and administer its own laws. The 
state was above the religion and made it, above the 
gods and decreed their worship; and so it was but 
legal and natural that the emperor, as the head and 
symbol of the Roman state, should be declared divine, 
and that all men should be held bound to worship 
and believe as he determined and decreed. 

Now, let us see how radically Christianity stood 
here opposed to all the old religions. It worked by 
persuasion, its great instrument was speech. It did 



Religion in First Fifteen Centuries. 183 

not seek to live by the protection or help of the state, 
but wished to penetrate as truth and love the mind 
and heart of man. It did not ask the laws to favour 
it, asked only to be allowed to live and work in 
its own way. And so what is it we see when it 
first appears on the great stage of history? Yv'e 
see that it comes and appeals to reason, it speaks 
to intellect, it tries to persuade spirit. The man 
that goes out and preaches stands, where? On 
Mars Hill, and reasons with the philosophers. The 
man that goes to Corinth, does what? Preaches, and 
preaches that he may convert and change. It is as 
a power living by speech, living by persuasion, that 
Christianity begins to be. When it has persuaded, 
what docs it require? That a man live a life holy 
unto God. Mark this, that where tlie old religions 
placed animal, the new religion placed spiritual sacri- 
fices. Men were to offer their spirits, their bodies, 
their living souls unto God. Where the old religions 
placed outer service, the new religion placed purity, 
peace, faith, hope, love, service of kind. While the 
old religions stood in subordination to the state, 
the new stood in supremacy over man, was a moral 
law over him, and so over any society into which / 
he might be gatliered. All was changed, and every 
man it reached became a great factor of change, a 
means of making a new humanity, a whole world new. 

II. 

1. Well, now, passing from these distinctive notes 
or features of the new religion, I would notice two of 



\ 



184 Religion in History. 

the ways in which the okl Pagan and Jewish ideas 
affected and changed it. The first of these was the 
way in which the old sacerdotal ideas came back. 
Remember, it is one thing for a truth to be revealed, 
another thing for it to be understood. It takes 
centuries before th3 mind of man grasps the meaning 
of a great truth. It takes centuries more before he 
is able to express it in outward action. Consider 
the situation; for ages the world had been accustomed 
to religions with priests, wdth sacrifices, with temples. 
The Jews had a priesthood, a temple, a ritual at once 
extensive and minute; all the Pagans had the same. 
Now when they came to think of Christianity, even 
after they had become Christian, the old elements in 
their minds were in some respects stronger than the 
new. They could not easily conceive a religion 
without those modes and orders wdiich had seemed 
the very essence of all the religions they knew, and so 
they proceeded, though all unconsciously, to translate 
the new back into the old. And so they thought of 
the apostle, of the propliet, or the presbyter as a 
priest; and they could not think of a priest without 
thinking of a sacrifice; and they could not think of a 
sacrifice without thinking of a temple; and so old 
Pagan ideas came back and held, for many a drear 
century, sway within the Christian Church. 

It is not possible here eitlier to trace the history 
of the change or fully explain its nature and effects. 
But let us try to weigh a fact or tw- o. In the earliest 
Christian literature, apostolic and post-apostolic, no 
man who bears office in the Church is called a priest. 
In it there was no official priesthood, and none of 



Religion in First Fifteen Centuries. 185 

the signs and rites associated with one. The men who 
held office were called either apostles, or prophets, 
or evangelists, or pastors, or teachers, or elders, or 
ministers, or overseers, but never priests. About the 
end of the second century, however, that fateful name 
begins to appear. A great Latin father, Tertullian, 
speaks of ^ ' the sacerdotal order, " and calls the bishop 
priest, and even high priest, though he was far enough 
from allowing priesthood in ^\\j sense that denied 
the spiritual priesthood of universal Christian men. 
Half a century later another writer, Cyprian, makes 
quite a strong claim on behalf of an official priest- 
hood, and shows us just beginning the change of 
the Lord's Supper from a simple feast of love and 
remembrance into a sacrificial ceremony. Xow, once 
a change like this l)egins it proceeds rapidl}^, and the 
further it proceeds the more disastrous it becomes. It 
forced into Christianity many of the limitations and 
much of the materialism of Judaism and paganism. 
Li the apostolic days every Christian man was a 
priest, with the right to approach God when and 
where he pleased; but this neo-heathenism tended 
to give, and ultimately gave, the official priest the 
right to stand between God and man, distributing 
the grace of the one, granting or denying access or 
pardon to the other. In the religion of Christ, no 
place was sacred or necessary to the worship of the 
Father, the one thing needful was the pure and true 
spirit; but the renascent sacerdotalism created a 
whole new order of sacred persons, places, ceremonies^ 
acts, which had to be respected if the worship was to 
be approved. The Christianity of the Xew Testament 



186 Religion in History, 

was a religion inward and spiritual, all its virtues were 
those of the believing, meek, true and loving spirit; 
but the Christianity of the priesthood and their 
church became outward and material, consisted in 
things the priesthood could prescribe and regulate, 
rather than the obedience commanded and approved 
of God. You will see at once how this affected the 
religion and modified its action. It was then as 
always, the truth of God had to wrestle with the 
ignorance and sin and imperfection of man. These 
cannot be expelled by mechanical forces, only by 
moral means, and the conquests of moral agencies 
are slow, but in the process the nature of man is 
uplifted and renewed. His nature affected the 
religion, but it more mightily affected his nature. 
What was of God prevailed. 

2. Then there was a second class of influences 
which we may describe as political. Men, as 
accustomed to a great state and religion as bound 
up with it, thought that apart from the forms of the 
state it could not be. So the result was that both in 
East and West, the state and the church tended to 
draw nearer and nearer in political form and idea to 
each other. It was an ill moment when Constantino 
took over his idea of Pontifex Maximus into the 
church. The old emperor had been supreme priest, 
the new emperor in the new religion tried to become 
the same. That either gave to the church a master, 
or, by turning the church into an organized state, 
with its hierarchies and graded orders, created the 
political interests and ambitions which made the 
church try to be master over the state. In the East 



Religion in First Fifteen Centuries. i8T 

the state remained master, and we see the result in 
Athanasius banished from his see at the fiat of an 
emperor, or recalled when the emperor so willed. 
Or we see it in the great Chrysostom, when he 
dared to rebuke the vice of an unclean or impure 
court, banished by Arcadius, a tool in the hands of 
the vengeful Eudoxia. In the West there was the 
opposite process, where the church, developing into 
a mighty state, became a mighty power, seeking to 
control in its own interest all the secular policies. 
It may have ofttimes stood on the side of order, 
nay, in its earliest days it almost always so stood. 
But so- vast a departure from the old original idea 
made the religion less potent for good than in its 
pure and primitive daj's. Yet, in spite of the return 
of the old sacerdotal, of the old political or civil 
idea. Christian truth lived. Christian thought worked, 
and there distilled into society througli the Chris- 
tian Church great ameliorative principles which 
were operative for good. 



III. 



Now this brings us to the point where we must 
consider the action, even as so qualified, of Chris- 
tian ideas, truths, or beliefs, on the prosperity and 
happiness of man. And I am anxious that this 
should be considered in relation, simply and purelj' , 
to the great industrial and economical qucstious. 

1. TTell, then, I will ask you to consider as a first 
step the state of the world as regards its social and 
economical condition when Christianity appeared. 



188 Beligion in History, 

And I will take it at its most favourable pointy 
as it existed in Rome. Xow Eome was a great 
city, it was the mistress of the world; the tribute 
of all places flowed into it. The Roman was a 
sturdy and stern man, proud of his great history, 
vain of his eternal city, remembering his republican 
virtues, and glorying in his past. What, then, was 
the state of Rome, the highest point of ancient 
civilization, in the first century of the Christian 
era? Here I want working men to listen, for I wish 
to speak purely and simply from the standpoint of 
one who believes that economical, industrial, and 
social questions are questions of religion, and who 
wishes to regard them altogether as such. Well, 
the population of Rome, if we are to take Mommsen, 
the greatest of all its historians in recent times, as 
our authority, was, in the first century, 1,610,000. 
How was it composed? There were 10,000 senators 
and knights, 60,000 foreigners, 20,000 garrison, 
320,000 free citizens, 300,000 women and children, 
and 900,000 slaves. Mark that: — about three-fifths 
of the population of Rome were slaves. That is one 
fact. 

{a) Now consider how the slaves affected in- 
dustrial and social economics.' You will notice in 
the first place, that these slaves were the absolute 
property of the master; he could do with them as 
you can do at this moment with your dog. Nay, 
your dog has more rights than a Roman slave had. 
For English law has grown so tender that it protects 
even the animal from the cruelty of man; but Roman 
law did not so protect the slave. Take, for example, 



Religion in First Fifteen Centuries. 189 

a case like that of Flamiiiius, who, when a gay young 
friend said he had never seen a man in the agonies 
of death, had a slave killed to show him what he 
wished. Or take the case of Pollio, who liked delicate 
lampreys, and fed them with his slaves. Or take 
cases such as that of Cato the elder dealing with 
his slaves as cattle, mere tools for the creation of 
wealth, to be broken or sold when useless. They 
were things, chattels, and no man who was a Roman 
citizen need care what happened to them. 

(/?) But now there is another and no less pertinent 
question, how did slavery affect labour? Well, you 
perceive all labour was done by slaves; trade and 
labour were altogether in the hands of the wealthy, 
but in a peculiar way: the rich who owned the land, 
owned the slaves, and through their slaves conducted 
trade. We know well what the conUict between la- 
bour and capital means. Yes, and with us labour can 
often hold its own; but there was no conflict between la- 
bour and capital then, for labour was capital, all 
slaves were capital, men that worked for the masters, 
and the owners reaped the profit. Many a man 
tilled his farm by slaves working chained in gangs. 
Many a man conducted a vast business by slaves, 
who made the profit and handed it to him. Many 
a man produced the raw material, manufactured it, 
carried it, and sold it — all by means of his slaves; 
theirs being the labour, and his the reward. And 
the scale on which the richest Romans could do 
business of this kind may be judged from the fact 
tliat some had as many as 10,000 slaves, and even 
20,000 was not an unknown number. The work, 



190 Religion in History. 

then, of the Capital was done by these 900,000 
slaves, and so the wealth of Rome was gathered into 
the hands of the few thousand men who owned 
them; and everywhere, except for these few thousand 
men, there was deep poverty, and within the poverty 
there was a slavery of a deeper and darker kind 
still. 

{y) But there is a third question, which has an 
even more significant light to shed on the temper and 
state of the time. Whence came the supply of 
slaves ? Rome could not of herself have produced 
and maintained so extraordinary a number; they 
were in large part the fruits of conquest. I said the 
tribute of the world flowed into Rome, and slaves 
were the tribute of the vanquished. If a Roman 
army conquered a province, or defeated another 
army, the captives, if they were not butchered in 
cold blood, were sent to Rome, to be sold as slaves. 
And here let me ask, and then leave you to answer, 
a simple question, yet one of profoundest moral 
import: — ^^ Is it possible to calculate the degree in 
which this way of handling the conquered must have 
depraved the conquerors? " 

2. But now we must study the social and ethical 
effects of this system. How did the multitude of 
slaves aflect the 320,000 free citizens? Where 
work, labour, trade, was the mark and sign of bond- 
age, Avith these no freeman could soil his hands. He 
could not labour, labour was a thing for slaves, and 
slaves alone. And so these 320,000 were idle, or 
they were worse than idle, the pimps, the buffoons, 
the men that lived to cater by crime for the pleasures 



Religion in First Fifteen Centuries, 191 

of those Avho could afford to buy. But as a necessary 
consequence, when productive industry was so little 
cultivated, the citizens who despised labor had to be 
maintained by the emperor at the public expense. 
The feeding of these citizens was a great problem. 
The grain ships from all the provinces came to 
Rome, and every citizen had his right to so much 
grain, and, as a rule, rich or poor took it. How 
many of you that could earn your bread would take 
help raised by a poor-tax, in a word, parochial re- 
lief? What man, earning a good salary, would be 
so mean as to go and get his parochial allowance? 
Yet what was parocliial allowance in its very worst 
form was taken by almost every man of these Roman 
citizens. And this dependency of the citizen on the 
government vitiated both, as this may illustrate: 
whenever an emperor came to power, or any fortunate 
event happened, he had to distribute great largesses; 
he sat in his seat, he remained emperor only by 
keeping the multitude sweet and well-inclined to him, 
and they were well-inclined only when paid, and well 
paid; and they often transferred their allegiance 
from the man that paid ill to the man that paid well. 
And so a Nero, and a Domitian, and a Caligula could 
reign, though each was shameful to his kind, because 
they not only were supported by the legionaries, but 
condescended to pay well the citizens who were too 
proud to work, but not too proud to live as beggarly 
dependents on an evil emperor. 

But there were other and no less inevitable results. 
If .you wish to keep a people SAveet, you must not 
only feed them; if they have no work to do you must 



192 Religion in History. 

amuse tliem, and the amusing is the harder and more 
arduous thing. And how did the great Roman em- 
perors amuse their men? Why, they built splendid 
amphitheatres in every Roman city, most of all in 
imperial Rome. There tlie ruins may still be viewed. 
Look at that mighty Colosseum, capable of seating 
81,000 people. Think wiiat it means. It means 
that an emperor had a people so idle, that he not 
only had to maintain them, but to amuse them. 
And what were the amusements? Whole row^s of 
gladiators, men, or even ungentle women, met there, 
with knife, shield, and sword, to fight, row upon row, 
and unto death. And ofttimes, when the weaker 
went down, he might look his look of pity that cried 
for mercy. But there, in the crowded benches, the 
empress and many another dainty dame would put 
down their thumbs, which meant, ^^No mercy; do 
him to death!" And if they did not fight man to 
man, then they fought man and beast, lion, tiger, 
bear, sometimes the man defenceless, sometimes the 
man with ofl'ensive weapons. In a show, given by 
wise Julius Caesar, 320 pairs of gladiators fought; 
Titus, the good and gracious, held a series of shows 
which extended over one hundred days; Trajan, the 
just, celebrated a triumph by an exhibition in which 
5000 contended; Domitian excelled himself and dis- 
covered a new sensation by instituting a fight be- 
tween dwarfs and women. There was a people 
glutted with blood, fed with slaughter, amused with 
death! And it is told that it became a kind of 
study in certain cases to watch the lines on the face 
of the dying. That was a nice and refined asstheti- 



Beltgion in First Fifteen Centuries. 193 

cism^ yet the most fit for the spectators of the glad- 
iatorial show. 

Such was Rome, and Rome in the early years of 
our Christian era, Rome in its refinement, Rome in 
its pride, Rome in its might. And if the Romans 
were not careful for toil and labor, or careful for 
life, what cared they for the defenceless? Infants 
are a joy to man; childhood is sweet and beautiful to 
us; 3^et in Rome what so common as exposure? what 
so little deemed a crime? what so little punished as 
an offence? Nay, men followed as a trade taking up 
the exposed children that they might turn them to 
the basest of uses, that they might make them live 
the most miserable of lives. Do you think the 
ancient world happy, radiant, because undarkened 
by the shadow of the cross? You can only so 
think in your ignorance. Its good was all for 
the few, the rich and the strong; but for the 
masses, the mighty multitudes of the poor and 
the conquered, the dependent and the enslaved, it 
was a miserable world, and their lot a lot of misery. 
The very sense of their rights was not yet born; the 
feeling of obligation towards them waited on the 
footsteps of Christ. 



IV. 



Now into this world, and face to face with it, 
Christianity came; and how did the religion affect 
the world? It is easy for us to see how truth 
must act; truth needs to work slowly, with many a 
great and painful struggle, into mind, and through 



194 Eeligion in History. 

mind into life. We think that a man has just to 
believe in order to be a new man. But though 
he is a new man^ it is long ere the new manhood 
becomes perfect in its blossom, longer still ere the 
new man makes a new humanity; and so we must 
watch the slow, yet sure and most etfective way in 
which Christianity, in its grand ideal period, went 
to work. Let me sketch in rapid outline one or two 
of the branches of its action. 

First, slavery. It could not and it did not 
abolish slavery; yet it declared itself in its ideal 
period the foe of slavery. In Christ there is neither 
Jew nor Greek, bond nor free. In the church 
there was no slave and no master; there all were 
servants of Christ, and members one of another. 
Slowly, as Christianity prevailed, the idea of man's 
equality entered into the heart of society. When 
you come to Justinian and his laws, slavery is still 
allowed, but to kill a slave is made a crime. Over 
him Christian law throws its shield. When you 
come later down still, the slave gains new rights. 
He can become a free man, he can enter into a 
religious order, he can there become the peer of the 
best; and in the new states that Christianity formed 
slavery, in the old sense, had no place. Nay, in 
spite of its many sins and imperfections, look how 
the church wielded in Spain Iberian and Visigoth 
together; how in France it welded Kelt and Frank; 
how in England it welded first Briton and Saxon, then 
Saxon and Norman, creating an entirely new ideal, 
the ideal of a society without slaves, where manhood 
is known and honoured, and has its rights confessed. 



Religion in First Fifteen Centuries, 195 

Then secondly, let us see how it affected the 
feelings and spirit of hunlanit3^ One of the 
earliest decrees of the Emperor Constantino was 
against the amphitheatre. The people passionately 
loved and still clung to their brutal play. But 
Christian faith held on against it, till finally, in the 
reign of Honorius, when a great victory was being 
celebrated, the monk Telemachus leaped into the 
ring, and gave himself a prey to the wild beasts. 
While many an angry howl rose against the man 
who had spoiled their sport, it was found that his 
deed had given the death-blow to the great evil; for 
the consciences of men were pricked and touched by 
that act of self-sacrifice. Then the great arena had 
its doom, the public conscience ratified the imperial 
decree, and the amphitheatre ceased. 

Then, thirdly, with the greater love of freedom 
and the softer social spirit, there came a large belief 
in the dignity of labour. Jesus had been a worker, 
Paul had been a worker, John and Peter and all the 
apostles had been workers. They gave dignity to 
toil. The Roman citizen could not soil his hands; 
the Christian preacher worked, toiling with his hands. 
And so labour became dignified, was made honour- 
able; men found that no manhood was so base as 
an idle manhood, manhood that loved to be relieved 
from toil and work. And now mark that this went 
on even when you little think it. The idle monks 
are frequently blamed; yet the monasteries used to 
be scenes of toil. You often go to Bolton or to 
Fountains, and you say in tlie wise manner of to-day, 
^^ Those old monks knew what they were doing; they 



196 Beligion in History, 

placed their houses in favoured spots, they chose 
beautiful situations." Yet they found them deserts, 
and they made them gardens; they found them moors, 
and they planted them, and drained them, and made 
them fertile fields. Our agriculture, our culture, our 
learning, owes more to the monasteries than many a 
modern man thinks. They made, or helped to make, 
work religious. ' ^ Laborare est orare, " they said; to 
work is to worship, to toil is to pray. 

Then, fourthly, see how the Christian religion con- 
secrated the home. It threw over the woman, it 
threw over the child, the halo of a great love. The 
child w^as of the kingdom of heaven. He who gave 
our faith its being was born of a woman, and so 
made woman sacred. I confess that there are mo- 
ments when, with all my strong dislike to priest- 
craft, sacerdotalism, and the poor and external form 
of Christianity it implies, I can feel how it taught us 
reverence for woman; how its adoration of a woman 
helped to create the purer, the nobler ideal of the 
home, the purer and grander faith in maternity. 
The man who is capable of despising his mother, of 
disowning or neglecting a wife, or being cruel to a 
child, is no man, he wants the soul of chivalry. The 
faith that brought out that great latent passion in 
man for gentleness to woman and child, has achieved 
a right noble work, has done a grand thing. 

But, fifthly, besides the consecration of the home, 
the early church organized the charities, the benefi- 
cences of time. You know not how destitute of true 
and generous action the ancient world was! It was 
a new thing that Lucian laughed at, — the sight of 



Eeligion in First Fifteen Centuries. 197 

Christians visiting the prisons and ministering to the 
captives. He thought them simpletons^ weak people 
who ofiered themselves as easy prey to the designing 
and crafty. He did not know that their act expressed 
a new passion, the enthusiasm of humanity, and had in 
it the promise of redemption for the world. It was a 
new thing, despised of many a man, to see poverty 
relieved, to see disease nursed, to see pestilence faced. 
If time had permitted I could have told how, when 
the barbarian hordes swept over Italy or across 
Africa or into Spain, rich Pagans fled far into their 
retreats, and left pestilence and famine and death to 
rage as they listed. But brave men like Ambrose 
and Augustine, faced the desolation and death. The 
matrons and the maids of the new faith went out to 
nurse in hospitals, in churches, by many a bedside, 
creating, where only misery had been, a sweet and 
gentle peace. The religion of Christ created charity; 
at its very birth it stood forth to organize the benefi- 
cence of man into the instrument of the providence 
of God. 

But above all, and most of all, what Christianity 
in these centuries did was to substitute a new mental, 
a new moral, a new spiritual basis for life. Life was 
made far sweeter, far nobler, far diviner by having a 
grander basis. No imperial decree, no fiat of state, 
no word of mere might constituted the organizing 
force of society. Men believed in a living God who 
was Eternal Sovereign and Father, in a living Christ 
who was an Eternal Brother. Men believed that 
man was to man a brother the world over. As 
brothers they owed duties that time could never 



198 Religion in History. 

fulfil, that place could never separate. The faith, 
however imperfect its forms, that lived and worked 
for these sublime and glorious ends, was a faith 
that indeed came from God, and made preparation 
and provision for another and better time when 
the large and eternal principles of righteousness 
could be applied to life and society. 



LECTURE V. 

THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION IN MODERN EUROPE. 

The point we have reached is one of the deepest in- 
terest. It brings us face to face with questions that 
relate to the immediate past, and concern the living 
present. Ancient history is the field of the special 
student. He works in it, knows it, loves it, lives 
in it, is perhaps more at home with its persons, 
principles, events than with the men, the problems, 
and the interests that appear and wrestle, that pre- 
vail and vanish on the stage of the passing hour. 
But modern Europe is our own very w^orld. We 
belong to it, breathe its atmosphere, live its life, 
and think its thoughts, and feel its electric currents 
thrill along our nerves. Its every movement is 
answered by the responsive pulsations of our hearts. 
Now this modern world of ours, in which we live, is 
one full of good, yet full also of evil; wealthier than 
any past age, freer, better educated, more informed, 
with vaster energies exercised on the field of politics, 
commerce, industry, science, literature, art, and 
religion. But it is also a world tliat in the lucid 
moments that come between the periods of its posses- 
sion by the pride of knowledge, feels, as no other 



200 Eeligion in History, 

age ever felt, over-burdened by a sense of its poverty, 
misery, failure, vice, and crime. There are in our 
world more and mightier forces contending against 
evil, than in any previous time. They fight all 
along the line a victorious battle. But while so 
fighting, never was age so moved and so possessed 
with the consciousness of evil. Now the sense of 
suffering is one thing, the actual amount and degree 
of suffering another, and altogether different. The 
conditions of happiness are to-day more and higher 
than ever in the history of the world before. But 
then the feeling of unhappiness is perhaps deeper, 
the sense of it keener and more real. Yet is not 
that an element of the highest promise of good? 
Evils that men do not feel, they will not remedy; 
evils that are deeply felt are evils not to be borne: 
and where they are not to be borne, they are certain 
to be abolished. To make an age conscious of evil 
is the first condition of making it consciously happy, 
in preparing it for larger happiness. There is at this 
moment a wide sense of suffering and of sin, but 
then within it there is also a great faith, a faith that 
we can win, and that we shall win, the saner, the 
more normal state of happy holy being. Modern 
Europe is far more conscious of suffering than 
ancient Europe, but in that consciousness there 
live and work the elements that have the most 
promise of deliverance, those that look toward the 
great and permanent ameliorative state that is sure 
to come. 



Christian Eeligion in Modern Europe. 201 



1. Now, in attempting to discuss so large a question 
as Christianity in modern Europe, it is easy to see 
that there is a great variety of sides from Avhich it 
can be discussed, while only a few from which it 
is possible to discuss it here and now. We might 
look at the question as a question of Churches. That 
indeed would be a matter of profoundest interest and 
instruction. We could compare the Greek, the 
Roman, the Reformed, the Lutheran, the Anglican, 
the multitudinous Free Churches of the modern 
world; describe their respective characters, the 
number of adherents they possess, the truths or 
doctrines they hold, the constitutions they boast, the 
work they have done or tried to do, the influence 
they have exercised or still exercise. That were 
indeed a noble as well as an instructive work. The 
churches represent perhaps the mightiest mass of 
devoted labour, of noble living, of ungrudging service 
of OLir kind, ever at any moment seen in the history 
of man. I put it to every fair-minded person as a 
simple problem: imagine all the Churches witli their 
agencies and institutions suddenly destroyed, can 
you conceive the result for our order, for our society 
and age? Think — would not the myriad-branched 
stream of charity be almost completely dried up at 
its source? Would not the ministries of mercy, of 
healing, of gentleness, of readiness to rescue the 
fallen, and cure the diseased, be suddenly brought 
to an end? Would not the inspiration that lifts 
many a life out of the dust be extinguished, and 



202 Religion in History. 

some of the fairest and most beautiful phases of 
human character be utterly blighted ami blurred? 
I know that in certain places what professes to be 
satire, but is only brutal coarseness, delights to 
magnify the individual error, crime, or sin of men 
who are held to represent Christian Churches and 
the Christian religion. That shallow system which 
does not or will not see the nobility, the magnanimity, 
the heroism that in many a life serves its kind with- 
out money and without price, is no system conscious 
of its own truth, fighting a noble battle with noble 
weapons. Men and women! a cause that needs an 
ignoble instrument is an ignoble cause. Fear not 
to say, the cause that can see nothing to honour in 
religion, when it has created and is creating millions 
of honourable lives, is no cause that believes in its 
own truth, or can wield a power for righteousness. 
It would be easy, too, by comparing the churches 
of to-day with the mediaeval churches to show how 
much mightier the former are. The ages of faith 
are now, not once were. The age of ignorance and 
superstition, or ceremony, lies behind, in mediseval 
bygone Christianity. The age of faith is in our 
midst. True, you may think of a time when all over 
Europe one church reigned, Avhen the monastery was 
as many acred — acred up to the lip, consolled up to 
the chin — as the modern peer. You may think of the 
time when out of their vast wealth the monks built 
their stately buildings, or the church reared its 
grand cathedral, as a time of faith. I think other- 
wise, and turn from then to now. I think of a land 
like England, where men often out of their poverty 



Christian Religion in Modern Europe. 203 

maintain and propagate their faith. I have known 
many a one who has given up large prospects of 
commercial wealth, large prospects of professional 
success, and lived a life of purest poverty tliat he 
might live a life altogether unto Christ. Or I think 
of lands like that lying beyond the Atlantic, where 
all churches are free, and a living people make the 
living church. And I say, look how the fact stands: 
The man in the market, on the exchange, in the 
factory, in the infirmary, by the sick bed, anywhere, 
everywhere, whose life is possessed and ruled and 
inspired by the great truths of religion, is the true 
measure of its power. And never at any moment 
in the whole history of the Christian faith were there 
so many men filled, commanded, guided by the holier 
and simpler truths of our faith. 

2. Yet we must look at the matter not simply as 
a question of Churches or Christian living, but also 
as a matter of belief. Here I will say, never was age 
more marked by its strong and victorious belief than 
ours. I know what I say. The truth of Christ is 
slowly subduing the mind of man into itself. Never 
was His authority so great as it is now. It is greater 
now than in that mediaeval time, Avhen religion was 
the great concern of the few, the mere pastime of 
the many. Then indeed the penances, the absolu- 
tions, the festivals, the fasts, the indulgences granted 
by a mighty priesthood helped the Church often only 
to gain influence over men by making a league with 
sin. It is now mightier than in the Reformation 
time, when princes and statesmen, ecclesiastics and 
divines made it their exclusive business, and armies 



204 Religion in History, 

fought to determine to what Church or to what creed 
the whole country or the whole people should belong. 
It is mightier^ too, than in an age like the eighteenth 
century, the pre-eminent age of apologetics. Then 
it was that on the one side there stood men like 
Toland, Collins, and Tindal, Bolingbroke and Chubb 
and Hume: and on the other men like Butler, and 
Berkeley, and Paley. Yet great as were the apolo- 
gies of that time, the greatest apologist of them all 
had to confess, ^^I know not how it has happened, 
but so it is, that many take for granted that the 
Christian religion is not so much as a subject of 
inquiry, but is at length discovered to be ficti- 
tious." That may not now be said. This century 
has given to faith its brightest sons. The men who 
when it is past will stand up as the great time-marks 
of the period, are men who boast of strong and 
noble faith. The thinkers that have had the might- 
iest influence are Christian thinkers. It may be that 
we have phases and forms of loud-speaking infidelity. 
It is true, nevertheless, that we have a great deep 
strong ^^sea of faith," a sea of faith that never was so 
near its full. And still it Avill continue to rise. As 
man's knowledge extends, so will it enlarge. It is 
not knowledge that religion has to fear, it is ig- 
norance: it is the absence of science applied to re- 
ligion. Give us more scientific spirit, give us 
wider knowledge, give us calm impartial study of 
man and man's past and man's spirit: and religion 
will reign, its power will grow, its might increase. 
Now these are phases of our question and subject 
that might fitly enough be here and now discussed. 



Christian Religion in Modern Europe. 205 

But they are not the peculiar phases that I wish to 
])resent to you. I have invited working men: to 
working men as workers I wish to speak. I have 
tried to exhibit religion in relation to history, to 
society, to the great practical problems that emerge 
in connexion with man in his social and collective 
life; and to that phase I am pre-eminently wishful to 
adhere. I want to look at Christianity — the Chris- 
tian religion in modern Europe — as it has affected 
the political, the social, the economical questions; 
or rather the great principles that lie as the com- 
mon basis underneath them all. And we look at 
these aspects and phases only in order that we may 
discover what religion is, and that we may say 
what it is to men who are workers and toilers, 
anxious to find freedom in the world, anxious to find 
wealth, character, happiness, and to know that to 
him that worketh there are proper wages and sure 
reward. 

II. 

1. Such, then, being our peculiar problem, I 
would say, at the outset, that modern Europe, as 
distinguished from ancient Europe, may be traced 
back into two great movements; a movement of the 
fifteenth century, and a movement of the sixteenth; 
one the Renaissance, the other the Reformation. 
The Renaissance affected and affects art and letters. 
The Reformation affected and aflects religion. The 
Renaissance was the revival of letters, touched all 
questions that related to man as a thinking, perceiv- 
ing, living being, who needs to be educated. The 



206 Religion in History. 

particular form that it took Avas in great part due 
to the rise of the Turkish power in the East, and 
the consequent extinction of the Greek Empire. 
At its fall many Greeks travelled westward bring- 
ing their language, their ancient literature, the 
laws, the practically lost knowledge of Greece and 
Rome. Their main home and centre of work 
was Italy. There they taught many a joyous 
and earnest spirit to read Plato, to know Aristotle, 
to discourse with the ancient orators and feel the 
exaltation and inspiration of the great poets. 
There men who had been accustomed to a medi- 
aeval and often heathenish Christianity, suddenly 
found themselves face to face with the old pagan- 
ism, pure and simple. And it became as it were 
the basis of their lives. They went back to the 
old naturalism, the love of flesh and of nature that 
had so marked, especially in its decadence, tlie 
ancient world. 

IN'ow how did this pagan revival, w^hicli replaced 
in great part mediaeval Christianity, affect these cities 
of Italy? It found them free : Florence rich, artistic, 
strong, rejoicing in its political freedom and republi- 
can institutions: Pisa enterprising, its rival, almost 
its equal: Bologna, Padua, full of life, the one 
studying law, the other studying medicine, both 
great in their universities : Genoa, Yenice, both 
queens of the sea, sending their fleets afar, bringing 
in the riches of distant Asia, making their merchant 
princes prouder than any royal blood in Europe: all 
free, all energetic, as it were in the flood tide of vic- 
torious life. But in the presence of that revived 



Christian Beligion in Modern Europe. 207 

paganism, enervating public life at its source, what 
happened? The rise of the Medici at Florence, the 
usurpations of tyranny and the growth of a perni- 
cious luxury in them all, made these Italian cities — 
once the freest, the wealthiest, and most enterprising 
of Europe — the poorest and most reactionary. 
There Italy remains, the victim of two great forces, 
the Renaissance in its classic naturalism and the 
Church it tried to supersede. Most beautiful, most 
historic of European countries, she lives at this day 
only in the first energies of a new attempt at life, 
seeking to catch up the other and more northern na- 
tions which have sped far forward in the great path 
of progress opened by freedom. 

2. The Renaissance as it passed into the Reforma- 
tion was by it incorporated and made a servant, true 
and good, of religion, helping the discovery and the 
knowledge of the old religious books. But taking 
the Reformation simply by itself, we find it was 
an attempt to recover the lost or forgotten ideal of 
the Christian religion, an attempt to return to the 
real and genuine religion of Christ. As indicated in 
the previous lecture, two great heathen inflaences 
had entered the Church. The first was sacerdotal, 
the second political. The sacerdotal brought into a 
religion which knew no priest, no temple, no sacrifice 
save what was spiritual, an immense hierarchy, a 
disciplined and organized priesthood, that by com- 
mand of the access to God and the rewards and 
penalties of the life to come, had become an organ- 
ized tyranny, which tjTannized not through what it 
got from Christ, but only through what it acquired 



208 Religion in History, 

from Judaized heathenism. The sacerdotal mind 
and practice is invariably disastrous to spiritual re- 
ligion. The man who stands \Yhere only Christ 
should stand^ between man and God, obscures faith, 
hides God behind his office and his rites. Where 
God cannot be seen for a man, the man conceals God, 
and in so doing is the great enemy of man. But 
while the sacerdotal was mischievous on the one 
side, the political was mischievous on the other. It 
made the Church aim at a supremacy over the 
State, which was not spiritual and moral, but politi- 
cal and secular; a supremacy which consisted, not in 
the reign of beliefs and ideals through the reason 
over the conscience, but in one organized polity 
commanding all the rest. The distinctive element 
of the Christian religion had been the reign of God 
in the human soul, comma/nding the man by com- 
manding the man's spirit and conscience. When 
the Church was taken and organized into the great 
civltas^ or State, or polity which sought to win, by its 
command over the future, authority in the present, 
in all that pertained to civil as well as religious life 
— it perverted Christianity and turned it back into 
the older heathenism. Now the Reformation was a 
great attempt to escape from these two Pagan ele- 
ments, to get back into a purer and nobler, because 
a more primitive religion. It meant to say, not the 
religion of the Church but the religion of Christ is 
what man needs. 

So Luther said, ^^ Get quit of the Pope, get rid of 
the priests, rid of all that stands between the 
individual soul and God, Let God and the soul 



Christian Religion in Modern Europe. 209 

stand face to face. Let God and the soul know and 
be known to each other. Here, in this immediate 
knowledge of God given by God, I stand; I can do 
no other. God help me, for God commands me." 
His watchword, which summed up this belief, was 
^^Justification by faith," — faith, face to face know- 
ledge of God, and justification, peace in the con- 
science where God lived, where God's voice was 
heard, believed, obeyed. That cry wakened Germany. 
They say, Luther made the literature of Germany. 
Do you know what that means ? To make a litera- 
ture means to make the mind of the people. To 
create the literature of a people is to create a people's 
spirit, its thought, its science, its whole inmost life; 
and, his enemies being witnes;^, Luther did that; he 
created the literature of Germany by that word of 
his, by his revival of the old faith. It entered into 
the spirit of Teutonic man and made his thought 
anew. 

III. 

That was only one section of the Reformation; 
there was another. Calvin went furtlier than Luther. 
He not only insisted on God and man standing face 
to face, but he insisted on applying his notion of 
religion by building it into a state. Xow I do not 
mean either to defend or expound Calvin's notion of 
God, any more than I intend to defend and expound 
his attempted realization of a State. I think both 
had august and noble elements. I think both had 
very terrible, very stern, very awful elements indeed. 
One thing I mean you to see and so must emphasize 



210 Religion in History. 

in your hearing: wherein he found faith he found life, 
he made belief into a law for living: he made the duty 
of the conscience to God the foremost duty of man. 
This conception of human duty he so bound up 
with his notion of God, his idea of religion, as to 
compel unity to enter into the life of the real believer. 
So doing, Calvin powerfully affected five countries — 
Switzerland, France, Holland, England, Scotland. 

1. Switzerland we may leave aside. But look at 
France. There came to her reformed people the 
hardest problem that could be set to any one. The 
faith they held, their king would not allow. The 
duty their conscience demanded, the State declared 
a duty not to be permitted. It is hard to be 
obedient citizens when the first law of the State 
contradicts the first necessity of conscience. Yet 
this people, though they stood for God against their 
king, became, whenever opportunity allowed, indus- 
trious, peaceable citizens, making their cities beauti- 
ful, their districts wealthy. When inspired by influ- 
ences born not of religion simply, but of other and 
baser motives as well, Louis XIV. revoked the edict 
that allowed them to live in peace, they bade, in 
great numbers, farewell to their Fatherland, that 
they might go elsewhere and serve their God. And 
so there came this principle through them: Religion 
is so supreme a matter of conscience, that the State 
which means to remain one, united, compact, har- 
moni3us, must grant freedom in religion. Martyrs 
to the doctrine they were: but in the State as in 
the Church, the blood of the martyr is the seed of 
freedom, power, and success. 



Christian Religion in Modern Europe. 211 

2. Note, next, the influence in Holland. Holland 
fou know has a noble history. The king it had 
for ruler, Philip of Spain, — forsooth no good man 
in the moral sense, though most pious in the 
ecclesiastical, — held that his subjects must be of his 
faith. But these Dutchmen said, ^ ^ This light of the 
reformed religion has come to us from God. We 
believe it to be His truth, and we shall obey God, 
rather than King Philip." Patient they had been, 
calm, industrious, fighting that great fight of theirs 
against the tides of old Ocean in the swamps by the 
sea. They had built out the waves; beneath their 
level they had cultivated their fields. A peaceful but 
most enduring people they were, to whom religion, as 
now understood, came, a very revelation of the pres- 
ence and power of God. They mustered in their 
cities and mustered in their fields; and against them 
came the great legions of Spain, led by Parma, led 
by Alva, led by Don John of Austria, led by the most 
famous captains of the age. But these men of 
Holland stood by their cities and fought in their 
swamps like heroes. They let the sea sweep over 
their fields and waste their cities, rather than yield 
the freedom that came to them from God. And 
when they had beaten back the mighty power of 
Spain, and gained their freedom, they nobly showed 
how a people that had fought to the death for their 
own freedom could help to make other peoples free. 
Their land became the very home and house of refuge 
for the oppressed of all lands. There freedom of 
thought and speech did reign, and reign in peace. 

3. Next in England. The Anglican Church is 



212 Religion in History, 

very proud of not being a Puritan Churchj reformed 
by means of Puritan theology. Yet the great 
English people lie under immensest obligations to 
Calvin, to Geneva^ to the Reformed men and doctrine. 
The men Calvin influenced were called Puritan, which 
meant — they thought religious men were men who 
ought to be pure, holy, of good report. These Puritan 
men became lovers of freedom, and they won freedom 
for you. When men said of a man weak, self-willed, 
proud, very much in want of all that makes manhood 
true and generous, ^^ He is king by Divine right, sits 
enthroned to be obeyed as the very vicar and repre- 
sentative of God," these Puritans stood forward and 
answered, ^^Nay, this people of England is a free 
people. We stand under obligation to God first. We 
are bound to obey Him. Being bound to obey Him, 
when the king commands what conflicts with the 
command of God, we must obey God rather than the 
king." Believing that, they fought their fight, and 
they won it, even though it seemed in defeat. 
Charles I., when he lost his head, made this great 
principle manifest and intelligible to all kings, that 
they are for peoples, and not peoples for them. That 
is the political principle England owed to her Puri- 
tans, and to the fundamental article of their faith; 
the article that, religion being of God, the religious 
man can be responsible for his faith, and for the 
conduct his faith demands, to God alone. 

Nor was their contribution to freedom limited to 
England. The revolution they accomplished not 
without blood, made the bloodless revolution of a 
later generation possible; and supplied at once prin- 



Christian lleligion in Modern Europe, 213 

ciples and inspirations that were in the succeeding 
centuries to help oppressed and impoverished peoples 
to cast off the regal and sacerdotal tyrannies under 
which they groaned. And they did more than teach; 
they sent out a branch that was destined to bear the 
noblest fruits of freedom. Of these Puritans many 
finding it hopeless to expect to be allowed to live at 
home and serve God in their own way, crossed the 
ocean and made another English nation beyond the 
sea. And they took with them the principles that 
lie at the foundation of the great American Republic, 
principles which have secured absolute freedom of 
religious thought, and made our kin beyond the sea 
the freest of all the peoples earth has known. 

4. Lastly, in Scotland. What did the reformed 
faith find there, and what did it accomplish? It 
found a people barbarous, downtrodden, enslaved, 
made coarse and brutal by a long war of independ- 
ence against their mighty neighbour; and as it were 
by the breath of a creative word, it made that people 
stand up happy, free, educated, strong. Whatever 
success the sons of that land have achieved, they 
have achieved by the faith, and the political energy 
created of the faith, they received from the reformed 
religion. 

IV. 

Now this rapid historical sketch has showed us 
that the Reformation, by virtue of its being a return, 
or an attempted return, to the religion of Christ, the 
purer and more genuine Christian religion, accom- 
plished far more than it attempted. It revealed 



214 Religion in History, 

ideas, energies, elements in religion that worked 
powerfully for human freedom, that created in the 
State a freer and a higher life, and created in man 
and in society nobler purpose, greater independence, 
that love of equal freedom and equal justice which 
but expresses the love of man. The principles that 
thence emerge may be illustrated on one or two 
points of detail. That their action may be appre- 
hended, we must come down to matters of living 
interest, matters of clear historical certainty that 
ought to be familiar to you. 

1. IN'ow, let me ask you as men who work, what 
are the three great terms that you think, as it were, 
the true Palladia of the order most to be desired? 
They are the terms which were the watchwords of 
the French Revolution — Liberty, Equality, Frater- 
nity. I cannot enter into a discussion as to the 
French Revolution. It has two phases, and can only 
be understood when both these are regarded. One 
phase is its negative, the other its positive side. Its 
negative phase it owes to Voltaire, to Rousseau, to 
the Encyclopasdists, and owes it to them mainly be- 
cause of the great abuses against which they had to 
contend. The French Revolution was a supreme 
act of retribution, the supreme act of national 
retribution on the stage of modern history. Under 
and after Louis XIY. , the king and the Church had 
bound themselves in an unholy alliance. That alli- 
ance meant bondage to man, meant poverty to the 
multitude, meant abdication of the highest political 
and social duties both of king and Church. The 
revolution, in its negative phase, hastened, though 



Christian Religion in Modern Europe, 215 

not caused, by tlie literature which exposed the un- 
holy alliance, was an act of retribution and retribution 
was never more deserved and never more inevitable. 
On the positive side it was an affirmation of principles 
which did not come from these negative quarters. It 
was the affirmation of the principles of Liberty, Equal- 
ity, and Fraternity ; although in its practical working- 
out it was the greatest affront to these principles, and 
repudiation of them which modern times have known. 
I am concerned purely with the great positive prin- 
ciples, not with the event, not with the method in 
which it was conducted, not with its retributive 
relation to the past, but only with its relation to 
these three great ideas of Liberty, Equality, Fra- 
ternity — whence came they? 

i. Liberty. Liberty is of two kinds, political and 
religious. Political liberty is revealed in the highest 
and most perfect degree where the people have the 
right absolute to make and to amend their own laws. 
Religious liberty is realized where every citizen 
possesses the right to judge in religious matters, 
and to determine the faith or the religion by or 
after which he shall order his life. Whence came 
the two great ideas as now understood, liberty, 
political and religious? 

(a) Political. It did not come from antiquity. 
No Oriental monarchy possessed or possesses it. 
They, every one, were or are despotic. It did not 
come from any ancient European state. You had 
a slight glimpse of what Rome was; there three- 
fifths of the population were slaves, and only two- 
fifths free. But there is Greece, and you will say, 



216 Eeligion in History. 

^' Think of those great republics of Greece; at 
Athens, where Plato lived, and Aeschulos sang; at 
Lacedaemon, where dwelt the great heroes of Grecian 
story? Think of those happy times before the 
Peloponnesian war — 4^he da3^s of the heroes of Mar- 
athon and Thermopylae^ when Attica and Sparta 
were free I " But what do you mean by free? How 
many made the State? Hear this: There were for 
every twenty-seven freemen in Attica a hundred 
slaves, almost four slaves to one free man: that was 
the ancient ideal of liberty! 

When you come to modern times and ask, 
^^ Whence came our liberty? Has it come from free 
thought? " Let us appeal to history; its testimony 
no man can gainsay. Who is the father of modern 
materialism? Thomas Hobbes. And what says he? 
The primitive state was a state of war, the strong- 
est man — and this is modern Evolution — prevailed, 
and so became king: might is right; and the 
king, being king by divine might, he alone is the 
free man, other men are bound to be his servants 
and do his will. But, you say, remember the later 
freethinkers! Well, try Bolingbroke; he believes in 
a patriot king, and sketched the ideal of one. And 
what sort of king was he? One who by skilful 
manipulation of the people was able to win, retain, 
and exercise absolute power, using all their political 
institutions as instruments of his will, deluding 
them by a representation that was only a means to 
his own ends. But a still more typical man is 
David Hume, the choicest sceptic Europe has ever 
known. Hume had two great enemies, and he loved 



Christian Religion in Modern Europe, 217 

nothing better than to swoop down first on one and 
then on the other. And these two great enemies of 
his vvere religion and liberty. Try Edward Gibbon. 
No man ever clothed a sneer in language so stately, 
or mocked in periods so majestic. Well, then, in the 
correspondence that unbosoms his inmost convictions, 
he warns his friend against the Anti-Slavery Agita- 
tion, for wild ideas of the rights and natural equality 
of men lurk in it. Democracy he hates; to him it is 
the last apostasy. He has only scorn for it: and 
he speaks of the French Revolution as an accursed 
thing. But these, you will say, are old, even anti- 
quated men; try, then, so late an exponent of free- 
thought as Comte. Where does he find his ideal king? 
Not in the sovereign of England; not in the monarch 
of any Constitutional State; but in the Czar, the 
Emperor of all the Russias, the greatest of the auto- 
crats, Nicholas. No, if 3'ou want political freedom, 
it is to States that have known what it was to believe 
in the Christian religion that you must go. You must 
go to Holland, as she issues purified from her baptism 
of blood, strengthened in her faith, and ennobled in 
her spirit by the unequal, yet victorious struggle 
against Spain. You must go to England as the 
Puritans made her. You must go to Scotland as 
she was made by Knox. You must go to America, 
so largely formed, organized, and governed by the 
sturdy Puritan men of New England and the mild 
inflexible Friends and stalwart Presbyterians of 
Pennsylvania. And underneath all you find that 
the grand dominant factors are the religious ideas, 
the faith that came through Jesus Christ. 



218 Religion in History. 

(/3) But, perhaps^ some of you will bell me that 
with religious liberty it is different. On the contrary^ 
I tell you that with religious liberty the same truth 
holds in a still more eminent degree. Gibbon^ in 
many a memorable phrase, stated his faith that the 
Old World was tolerant. Yes, it was tolerant — to 
gentlemen of culture, to persons of refined taste, who 
could, while taking part in religious services, despise 
religion ; but never tolerant to an earnest man, 
who dared openly to differ from the religion of the 
State. I love Plato; I look upon his books every 
day, and I never look upon them but with love. The 
thoughts that lived in him are living thoughts in 
many a mind still. But now look at his idea of 
religious freedom. Hypocrisy he would punish as a 
crime. Disloyalty to the gods accepted by the State, 
he would visit with imprisonment, solitary and stern, 
for five years, and if the man at the end still rebelled, 
he would have given him over to death. That was 
the idea of perhaps the most enlightened man in all 
antiquity. And, as we have already seen, it was the 
same in Rome. There the laws of the State and 
public opinion were just as severe in dealing with 
men who had broken with the ancient faith, or had 
dared to accept a new one. To this the early 
Christian persecutions alone were a sufficient witness. 
Where, then, do you find the first assertion of religi- 
ous liberty? In the fathers of the Christian Church. 
TertuUian, for example, says, '^It is ill homage to 
God to compel a man to serve him, as if He could 
be pleased with the service of hypocrisy." Athan- 
asius says, ' ^ No forced obedience pleases God : 



Christian Religion in Modern Europe, 219 

He dislikes that men should be made religious bj 
hatchet and by sword." Hilary of Poitiers told an 
Emperor, ^^You govern that all may enjoy sweet 
liberty; and peace can be established only by allow- 
ing each to live wholly according to his own convic- 
tions." '^God is the Lord of the universe, and 
requires not an obedience that is forced." And 
Lactantius, one of the most eloquent of the Fathers, 
argued that only reason, never compulsion, availed 
in religion, which could be defended not by slaying, 
but by dying; not by wasting, but by suffering; not 
by injustice, but by fidelity. 

When we come to modern times, what do we 
find? Now that tlie principle is gained, you get many 
a man who has denied religion crying, give us freedom 
of thought. But look at the jnen who have made 
the modern belief in liberty of mind, and do you 
find that they were anti-religious, atheistic, infidel? 
Here is Hobbes's principle: '^^ The prince has a right 
to say what liis subjects are to believe." So great 
is that right that if any subject dares to deny what 
the king enjoins, lie commits a crime against the 
law of the State. If a man were to come from 
the Indies and teach liis religion where another has 
been established, he ought to be prosecuted for 
crime. Nay, if the king be infidel, yet the people 
are to believe after his manner, for he was appointed 
to his office of God ! Where God has appointed, 
men are bound to obey. So held and so reasoned 
the man who may be most justly termed the father 
and founder of modern Materialism. 

Again, no man did more to bring round the 



220 Religion in History, 

French Revolution on the negative side than 
Rousseau. And what did he teach in his ^^ Social 
Contract"? He lays down the natural articles of 
belief, and they are to be articles of citizenship. 
If a man denies them, he is to be exiled, exiled 
not as denying religious dogma, but because he is 
'^unsocial," violates, as it were, one of the primary 
articles of association. If a man, who has con- 
fessed himself as ^^ social," and thus expressed his 
^^sociability," is unfaithful to the profession of belief 
that admitted to society, then he ought to die as 
guilty of crime against the law, the social law on 
which the society or state was based, and which he 
had accepted and received. In the ^^ Spirit of Laws," 
Montesquieu, another precursor of the French Revolu- 
tion, teaches, that where an established religion is, 
there no new religion ought to be allowed to be. 
An established religion is the law of the land, and no 
land, he argued, with fine contempt for the rights of 
conscience, can allow its laws to lie neglected. And 
grant the principles from which the men reasoned, 
and we must concede that these w^ere legitimate 
inferences; — clear, plain, logical deductions from a 
system that posits, as the grand parent of social or- 
der, force, whether dubbed as matter, or social con- 
tract, or regal power, or indeed any form of unmoral 
might. 

If, then, I want to find where religious freedom 
came from in modern times, where am I to go? 
Lecky says, ^'Toleration is created by scepticism, 
and belongs to a sceptical age." But all modern his- 
tory disproves that assertion. Where religion is made 



Christian Religion in Modern Europe. 221 

a matter of conscience and not of the magistrate^ tol- 
eration is necessary. Where religion is made no mat" 
ter of the conscience^ but of the magistrate, intoler- 
ance and persecution are inevitable. So we find those 
Reformers and religious thinkers of whom I have al- 
ready spoken, men like Jacobs, like Hanserd Knollys, 
like John Robinson, maintaining — religion is a mat- 
ter of conscience; therefore the magistrate ought to 
leave to conscience the question of religion, and in 
no way interfere with it. Roger Williams, having 
pleaded in England and in I^ew England for tolera- 
tion, realized religious freedom in his settlement on 
Narragansett Bay. Harry Vane, the younger, a 
stern and true, yet most devout and tender spirit, a 
typical Puritan and Republican, Avas also a great 
advocate of the same principle, with faith enough 
to put it in practice when he was in power. In 
these days, when I wish to brace my spirit, to feel 
the strength of a great conviction which fears no 
discussion, and lies open on all sides to the light, 
which it craves as God's own gift, where do I so 
gladly go as to the Areopagitica of John Milton? 
There, in that speech for unlicensed printing, stands 
forward the grandest plea for freedom of thought 
which the English language or any other language con- 
tains. Later, too, did not the ^^ Letters on Toleration'' 
by John Locke, reason out, on narrower and less noble 
grounds it is true, but still, on religious grounds, the 
same great principle? The only convincing and vic- 
torious plea for freedom of thought, for liberty to be- 
lieve according to reason and speak according to con- 
science, is the one that finds its ultimate principle 



222 Religion in History, 

and basis in the great faith, that religion belongs to 
the man and to the man's God, that it is the sacred 
inmost possession of conscience, and must be free from 
the magistrate, a matter in which the responsibility 
is to God only. 

When you go from the actual advocacy to the at- 
tempted realization of the principle, our position 
holds even more completely. Where, as a matter of 
historical fact, was religious freedom first realized by 
a state? In Holland. She had won freedom, had 
shaken off Spain, and had learned from her own bit- 
ter experience what freedom and religion meant. 
And so almost as soon as she had achieved liberty, 
she became the home of the persecuted in Europe. 
There, within the very country which had been 
quickened, revived, created by a great religious en- 
thusiasm, religious freedom reigned. There you 
might find the French Descartes writing, pleading, 
free to speak as became the father of modern philo- 
sophy. There you might find Italian, Spanish, and 
Portuguese Jews, tolerated while intolerant. Spi- 
noza, cast out by the synagogue, but tolerated by the 
reformed state, there stands forward to advocate his 
Pantheism and his political theory. There, too, you 
might discover English Puritans like Perkins and 
Ames, like Robinson and Jacobs, erecting their 
churches, addressing their flocks, free to speak the 
thing they willed. When the same principles were 
recognized in Rhode Island, by Roger Williams's 
settlement, in the settlement of Penn, and finally 
through all the states of the American Republic, it 
was done for religious reasons, in vindication of 



Christian Religion in Modern Europe. 223 

those rights conscience most strongly affirms T\'hen 
it most strenuously believes that God is its only 
Sovereign, and that where He reigns no man or 
magistrate can be allowed to interfere. 

But when Revolution in France passed into the 
hands of Deists and Atheists, what happened? Ay, 
what happened? I do not simply refer to the way in 
which the Church was, so to speak, levelled to the 
dust, and the clergy expelled or sent to tlie guillotine. 
I refer to such events as the guillotining of Clootz 
and Chaumette. The deistic, the Worship-of-the- 
Supreme-Being, party said, ^* These men are atheists: 
they deny the immortality of the soul, a doctrine 
which comforted Socrates in his death: the idea of 
the Supreme Being and the immortality of the soul 
is a continual appeal to justice; it is, therefore, social 
and republican, and so the men who deny it ought to 
die." And on this very ground, maintained and 
vindicated by Robespierre, nineteen of the worship - 
of-Reason and deity-of-the-people party, including 
^^ Anaxagoras" Chaumette, ^' Anacharsis" Clootz, and 
Hebert, were doomed to death, sacrifices to their 
own principle — ^^ There is now one god only, the 
people/' And even they themselves, Hebert and 
Chaumette and Clootz, the men of the atheistic party, 
were no better. To utter the word Providence was 
denounced as a crime, and to publish a book that 
expressed belief in God was declared a crime the law 
ought to punish and prevent. And to-day, if you 
want to find a party that has in its heart the will to 
be intolerant, you have but to look across the Chan- 
nel, and there you will find the party that is most 



224 Religion in History, 

aggressivel}^ negative prepared to proceed to the ex- 
tremest measures of repression, both as regards the 
profession and practice of religion. Political liberty, 
liberty of thought in matters religiouS; was made by 
the religion of Christ, especially as it existed before 
it was civilly established and after it was reformed. 
It alone has the right to stand and say, I have made 
liberty. And this is an historical fact which no man 
can gainsay. 

ii. Then there is the matter of Equality. Equality 
means that in the eye of the law and of justice there 
is no difference between man and man. Law and 
justice know no rich and know no poor: know no 
sovereign and know no beggar: they only know the 
man. But equality means more than this. It means 
not of course that inherent capacity, mental endow- 
ment, personal dignity and character are the same in 
all men; but it means that in the latent, yet actual 
ideal of humanity, or in the potential yet intrinsic 
worth which belongs to our nature as human, all men 
are equal. Within every man there is an ideal latent, 
perhaps dead and even buried, but still an ideal 
capable of resurrection: and it is this ideal of 
humanity in every man which makes the true equality. 
And whence came the ideal which constitutes what 
we term equality? It came into the world when this 
principle was stated: — ^^ There is no respect of per- 
sons with God: God is no respecter of persons." 
That was the first great yet simple formulization 
of the principle; and the principle lies at the root 
of all our later social development, making this 
evident that it is only where you have men equally 



Christian Religion in Modern Europe, 225 

related to God, God equally related to every man, 
that you have men made equal. 

iii. As with Equalit}', so with Fraternity. It 
reposes upon the great faith in the Fatherhood of 
God and the consequent brotherhood of men. You 
cannot find any other basis so deep, so broad, so 
strong as this. And this is the basis Christianity 
laid, without which the belief in fraternity would never 
have been, and could not even now continue to be. It 
is only where men feel as sons of a common Father, 
that they feel towards each other, however distant in 
time or space, however dissimilar in race or speech 
or nationality, as towards brothers. And have you 
considered the forms in which the Christian religion 
has helped men to realize their brotherhood? ^ ' Who 
is my neighbour? " asked the lawyer, and Jesus made 
answer by the parable of the good Samaritan; and 
ever since, the men who have most loved Christ, 
have been men who have done into practice the 
moral of His parable. What did the charities of the 
early church signify? That a religion had arisen 
among men that was a religion of brotherhood and 
mutual helpfulness. What do modern missions 
signify? That the most cultivated and high-blooded 
peoples on earth recognize -their kinship, and the 
obligations of their kinship, to the most savage and 
debased? Science loves to be generous and benefi- 
cent, but it cannot be said to pity the savage; knows 
not what better to do witli him than to speculate 
as to his place in the history of civilization, and as to 
the causes of his decline and decay under its touch. 
Commerce likes to discover new peoples and lands, 



226 Religion in History. 

but only that she may find a new market, a field 
where by more advantageous barter she can increase 
the riches of the civilized, even though it be by 
Avorking poverty and ruin to the savage. Certain 
imperial peoples love to find new scenes for the 
exercise and display of their imperial genius; but 
imperial policies only the more deeply divide the 
sovereign from the subject race. These are not the 
methods either for creating or expressing fraternity; 
where the stronger man sees in the weaker only a 
means for his owm instruction, or a source of wealth, 
or an instrument for his ends, he may use him as a 
tool, but he will never think of him, feel to him, or 
act towards him, as a brother. But Christian missions 
witness to the fact that the Christian religion has 
accomplished this marvellous feat. It has made 
civilized man feel that he and the savage are of one 
blood, that the savage is as dear to God as he is, has 
as vast capabilities, as boundless promise of being as 
his own nature can boast. The religion that has 
created this sense of kinship and duty is the true 
mother of man's faith in human fraternity. 

2. I deeply regret that I must now leave out a large 
part of what I had meant to say, and shall only ask 
you to consider whence came the great forces ameli- 
orative and helpful in modern society. Take for ex- 
ample the emancipation of the slave — why accom- 
plished, why prosecuted, by whom and for what 
reasons ultimately carried through. Were not the 
men and their motives altogether Christian? Then 
think of the reform of prisons. Can you forget John 
Howard and Mrs. Fry, what they were and what 



Christian Religion in Modern Europe, 227 

they did? Consider, too, the attempts at criminal 
reform — ragged schools, reformatories, the varied 
agencies which wed mercy with justice and reform 
with penalty. If you look even at the great broad 
field of war, so dread, so terrible in its destructive- 
ness, what touches it with the gentle spirit of mercy? 
Why is there the red cross on the white ground? 
What does it mean but that the minister of mercy is 
the minister of religion, conscious or unconscious 
minister perhaps, yet minister still. Had time per- 
mitted, I should also have surveyed some of our 
modern philosophies, especially those that seek to 
create a religion of humanity, and should have 
attempted to show that wherever they are creative, 
energetic, great in their ameliorative impulse, they 
have borrowed, without acknowledgment, and un- 
consciously perhaps, but still borrowed from the 
religion of Christ. This only must I ask you in 
conclusion to remember: Ttiese elements, all of 
them, need to be gathered into an organic whole, 
into a living structure, placed in relation to a great 
throbbing centre. You cannot have sporadic, dis- 
membered, isolated Christian forces, walking up and 
down the land doing their work: you must bring all 
into unity, you must centre, converge, weld them 
into the great central thought, into the mighty living 
organism. Without Christ, without the Eternal 
Father, without the living Saviour and the living 
God, they are impotent, destined to slow, inevitable 
death. Men and brethren! I speak to you as unto 
men who love order, who fove freedom, who love 
justice, who love right. What has come to you as a 



228 Beligion in History, 

glorious heirloom from the past, a splendid force that 
has worked out jour highest happiness, your best 
prosperity, your darling principles of hope, claims as 
its due your strenuous loyalty and noblest thanks. 
Faith, life, enthusiasm, entire devotion of the spirit, 
are the simple tribute it deserves. 



LECTURE YI. 

THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION IN HISTORY AND IN MODERN 

LIFE. 

The lecture of to-night is to deal with religion in 
the face of to-daj, especially so far as it has 
light to shed upon the great and the vital problems 
that relate to the welfare and to the wellbeing of 
our toiling millions. If religion be what it has been 
here described as being, it ought to have some light 
to shed on these problems. It is not the theoretical 
unbelief of to-day that troubles me; it is its practical 
ungodliness. The worst denial is not the denial of 
the name of God, but of the reign of God, and His 
reign is denied whenever men confess that He is, 
but live as if He had no kingdom, no law to govern 
the individual, to be incorporated or realized in the 
society or the state. Men have been too anxious to 
limit religion, to keep it as they think to its own 
province and work, forgetting that the province of 
religion is the whole man and the whole life of all 
men. To narrow the sphere or the authority of 
religion is only a bad way of impugning its truth, 
a stealthy way of evading its claims. To throw the 
emphasis from the inward and ethical to the out- 



230 Religion in History. 

ward and ceremonial is but a more pretentious lorm 
of evasion. I confess that I am sick even unto 
death of what Ruskin has well called the ^^ dramatic 
Christianitj^ of the organ and the aisle, of dawn- 
service and twilight revival, gas-lighted and gas- 
inspired Christianity," and I long with my whole 
heart to see all our churches become branches of 
the only true mother-church, the church that is the 
mother of all our humanities, because the home of 
all our divinities, the bearer, the living vehicle, of 
the great purpose, or burden God sent through His 
Son and by His Spirit to man. If religion were 
truly interpreted and represented in the living 
of all Chiistian men, as it ought to be, I have 
no fear as to its being believed. It needs but 
Christian men and churches to be faithful to the 
mind of Christ to make that mind reign in and 
over modern men. 

Now the aim and purpose of these lectures has 
been to exhibit religion in its larger aspect, in its 
wider historical and social significance. There has 
been no attempt at philosophical or historical apolo- 
getics, only at the discovery and exposition of the 
forces which history has proved to have worked most 
for our common human good. The faith of Christ 
is to me the last and highest truth, the worthiest as 
concerns God, the most reasonable as it relates to 
man. But though that position be most capable of 
proof, it is not one that has been here specifically 
attempted to be proved. I may at some future time 
make the attempt; for I do not deny the right of 
inquiry in matters of faith, on the contrary, I hold 



Christian Religion in Modern Life. 231 

it a most sacred duty. Truth loves to be searched 
into, to be inquired after, to have the light of heaven 
let in upon it from all sides; but truth discloses her 
presence to none but the pure in mind and heart, 
to those only who seek her out of sincerity and 
great love. The man who speaks dishonourably of 
another's faith does no honour to his own; the man 
who uses a dishonourable weapon in the battle for 
the truth dishonours truth, and to dishonour it is to 
be disowned of the truth, and so to lose it. For 
what can it do but forsake the man whose soul is 
forsaken of reverence? " 



1. Our purpose, then, has not been apologetic, 
but simply historical and expository, an attempt 
by the help of scientific analysis and comparative 
criticism to discover those moral and religious forces 
that have most contributed alike to the individual 
and common good. And this question was chosen 
because it seemed at once the most radical and the 
most relevant to the problems now before the people. 
The work done for the past has now to be done for 
the present, and so to-night we sliall attempt a further 
exposition of those principles we have been studying 
in history in their relation to living man, or simply 
to our political, social, industrial questions. Yet it 
is necessary that we see the relation of our new dis- 
cussion to our old. Mark, then, the principle which 
has underlain all our discussions: — Every society is 
built up on certain great beliefs or ideas. It articu- 
lates or expresses these in its institutions, laws, ideals. 



/ 



232 Religion in History, 

aims. The beliefs or ideas that underlie the society 
or state are the truths or beliefs that constitute its 
religion. As these are, its institutions must be. 
Find out the ultimate beliefs of a people and you 
will find out the character of its institutions, or from 
the study of its institutions you can work back to its 
fundamental beliefs. Where these beliefs are bad, 
society cannot be good. Where the fundamental 
faith is in a might, — that is, in an oppressive, ir- 
resistible force, — the institutions will express simply 
a realized t3Tanny, a struggle of conflicting forces 
where the strongest has prevailed. 

Look for one moment at certain typical religions. 
China is remarkable for its ancestral worship. That 
is its most common and its most ancient worship; 
but to worship ancestors is so to revere the past as 
to stand for ever by it. The people who worship 
their forefathers are the most conservative of 
peoples; where the father stood, the sons try to 
stand; departure from the old law is last impiety. 
So China has been through thousands of years 
stationary, has hardly known change, and living so, 
has been persistent, remaining while other more 
changeful empires pass and decay. Or look at 
India. As we have seen, the ultimate thought in 
the Indian mind is Brahma. Brahma means the 
universal soul, or life; it is but the equivalent of 
necessity, the reign of a force that, unresting, runs 
through all forms of being, one in essence, and 
necessary in its action, while ever changing its 
form. In harmony therewith they have conceived 
Brahma as the universal soul, and thinking of 



Christian Religion in Modern Life, 233 

him anthropomorphically, have said: from his head 
was made the Brahman, the man of the priestly 
race, from his breast and arms the Kshatrija, 
the royal and warrior caste, from his legs was 
made the Yaisya, the yeoman, the farmer, and from 
his feet were made the Suclras, the toiling class, 
the lowest caste in the ancient Hindu world. Now, 
that is a religious theory become a social tyranny. 
The caste-order is the order of God, and the head 
has not only the right of commanding the arms and 
the trunk, and of using the limbs, but of treading 
ruthlessly on those formed from the feet and lying 
underneath them. Or take, as before, the ancient 
empires of the nearer east, Egypt or Assyria. They 
conceived emperor or king as divine. He owned 
the nation, all the people were his, and he could do 
with his own as he pleased, and as he pleased he 
did v/ith his own. So look how Tiglath-Pilcser, 
Shalmanezer, Sennacherib, Assur-Bani-Pal, and the 
other Babylonian and Assyrian conquerors, led forth 
their mighty thousands, threw their armies away 
in the desert, or at a siege, and cared nothing for 
the armies they threw away, only for their own pur- 
poses or ends. Xow contrast with this the past 
week.^ Every home in England has thrilled with 
pain— why? In an African desert a handful of 
heroic Englishmen were surrounded and assailed by 
an army of strong and brave Soudanese, and there, 
in the unequal conflict, 110 of our brothers are said 
to have perished. And how have we received the 

1 Sunday, March 16.-0n the Thursday before the battle of El Teh 
had been fought. 



234 Religion in History, 

news? The thought of those brothers of ours 
dying there, and no less the thought of the brave 
barbarians who so strenuously fought and so will- 
ingly died for altar and home, is to this people a 
thought of suffering, brings a sense of personal pain 
and loss. Now, why do we so value human life, 
while in the ancient world life was thrown so 
thoughtlessly away. To ask anew that question 
is right and necessary, for in it lies the difference 
between two worlds. You will never build up a 
free and ordered state, you will never have wealth 
well distributed, you will never have honour and 
order, good in their kind, realized, unless you esteem 
man noble, and esteem all men alike. Here, then 
is the problem: — high order, waiting on a right idea 
of man, is in process of being realized now, but was 
not realized in the old world, nor is realized in any 
eastern heathenism — why this difference? The 
answer is the answer that comes back over all the 
ages; because of what has come through Christ. 

2. Let me recall, though but for a moment, the 
argument of the past lectures. They proceeded, 
when the question became historical, from this 
position: all old religions prior to the religion of 
Israel had no moral character, because no moral 
deity. Being without moral deities and religions, 
the nations were not built upon moral principles or 
for moral ends, but only through despotism or for 
personal or sectional interests. The coming, through 
Moses, of the high faith in Jehovah and His law laid 
the foundation for a new order, made one possible. 
The order was not a priest's, the order was not a 



Christian Religion in Modern Life, 235 

king's, it was GocVs, and as God's based on His moral 
law, Avhich expressed His moral nature. It made 
every man responsible to God directly. It made God 
govern every man alike. Where God is the common 
Ruler, the distinction betAveen king and subject may 
remain on the lower and limited field of the State, 
but its old absolute character is lost, for on the higher 
plane, where temporal distinctions disappear in eter- 
nal, both stand alike as subjects of God, equal in the 
eye of His law. The rich and the poor meet together, 
the Lord is the maker of them all. And standing equal 
in the eye of His law, then there is a worth attached 
to the man, to the single person, to the individual soul, 
that makes his sufierings, the loss of his life or of his 
happiness, a crime against God and against the order 
He instituted. Starting from that rudimentary point, 
note how the ancient Jewish state was built up. It 
w^as built up in order that the will of God, — that is. 
His moral law, — might in the relations of man to 
man reign, and in the action of state and people 
be realized. Xoav, the ideas of the Old Testament 
were taken up and incorporated in the Xew, but 
extended into a universalism. God became the 
Father of all men, loved all men, all men became 
brethren, the human race one vast family, every unit 
stood to every other as brother to brother, and the 
duties enjoined were fraternal duties, the duties of 
universal neighbourliness and brotherliness. On 
this great position an entirely new order of the 
world coukl be built, an entirely new course and 
organization of humanity could take place. Man 
at first did not understand what had come. The 



236 Religion in History. 

old was too strong for the new, out of the ancient 
religions, out of the ancient state, old forces came 
into the Christian society and reigned there, yet 
in spite of these, through the form in which they 
were incorporated, great Christian truths worked, 
and worked penetratingly, lovingly, assimilatively, 
through the whole of society and the life of 
man. And when later, in a moment of supreme 
religious fervour, which was also a moment of 
rare intellectual quickening, the world tried to 
go back to the nobler primitive thought, then 
new forces, released and relieved, created higher 
liberty in the state, purer thought in the life, more 
equal justice between man and man. And so the 
new spiritual force has been at work, subordinating 
the old unto itself, and the humanity that is rising 
is a humanity distinctively in its basis of Christ, 
though for God. 

II. 

1. Now, mark, the conclusion of our past discus- 
sions is the foundation of our new. The conclusion 
is this, the great fundamental Christian beliefs, the 
beliefs as to God, as to man, as to man in relation to 
God and His purposes, have supplied a new basis 
for human thought, and so a new foundation for 
human society; and the society that is being built up 
on this basis is radically unlike the ancient society. 
Now, observe, I say is being, I do not say has been, 
built up. The work is in process. It is not com- 
pleted, and in the doing of it every man of us 
ought to bear his part. But while the building 



Christian lieligion in Modern Life. 23T 

proceeds^ worked by the hands of men, it is to be in 
harmony with the beliefs directly created by Christ. 
These beliefs may be described as, borrowing a 
word from one of the greatest philosophers, archi- 
tectonic, that is, they are beliefs that while they 
construct, regulate the structure, govern it in all 
its parts and in its ultimate design. Their action 
has been illustrated in history, for wherever Christ's 
personal influence has been mightiest and most im- 
mediate, there the building has most victorious- 
ly proceeded. It has been with Him, in Him, 
through Him, that all has been done. Did time 
permit, I would take you a wide survey of the an- 
cient ideals of humanity, and compare them with 
our own. I would take 3'Ou, for example, to the an- 
cestral worship of China, the adoration of heaven, 
as prescribed and followed by the ancient sages, and 
would show you this worship making a people that 
may not move, that lives on in a kind of permanent 
immobility; or I would take you to the ancient 
Hindoo ideal as it stands incarnated in the laws of 
Manu. These laws determine a man's future by 
his relation to the priestly caste. If a man de- 
spises a priest, stands in his way, or uses profane 
speech of him, he is sentenced to painful punish- 
ment, here and hereafter. If a Brahman woman 
breaks her caste by marriage, there follows degrada- 
tion for lier, and for her oflspring, and for their off- 
spring, degradation in ever descending degrees. 
There we find a whole society fitted into an iron 
framework, built up, inflexible, immovable, accord- 
ing to the mind of a tyrannical priesthood. Or I 



238 Religion in History, 

would take jou to the greater ideas that lie in 
Plato, in the Republic and in the Laws, already in a 
way sketched, making the modified Greek Republic 
possible, yet making a humanity utterly void and 
mean. He, great as he was, thanked providence 
that he was born a Greek, and no barbarian, free 
and no slave. To be a barbarian! It had been 
better not to have been born than to have had so to 
speak as to emit sounds that could hardly be held 
articulate or reasonable speech. 

But, now, what is our own modern dream, our 
ideal vision? All this great humanity forms a 
mighty family. Man, in all his units, stands the 
creature of God, His offspring eternally loved by 
Him, called by Him through love into being. Man 
as a race is constituted in all his branches a unity 
through the one God, and is, as an individual, a 
being who owes duties to every other man, owes 
duties of good, of service, of truth, of honour, of 
right, of grace. There is here a notion of man, of 
humanity, that gives a dignity to the person and 
a nobility to the race unimagined by the ancients, 
that makes of human nature a higher thing, and of 
human life a nobler thing. And I anew affirm, the 
life we live and know, is, while in all its noble ele- 
ments the direct creation of Christ, yet at best re- 
mains only the promise of what He has still to 
achieve. 

2. Now, I should have liked exceedingly, in the 
light of our discussions, to have compared these 
Christian beliefs with certain modern ideas, pro- 
posed as substitutes for them, and have judged 



Christian Religion in Modern Life. 239 

these beliefs and ideas comparatively. For example, 
men say, if we could get rid of the human soul and its 
immortality, how much happier we should be: the 
belief in a continued being hereafter only makes the 
here more intolerable. Now one great advantage 
of the comparative study of religion is this: — When- 
ever a statement like that is made, you at once 
turn to places or religions where such things 
have been realized, look at them, analyze their 
elements and action, and so discover their intrinsic 
quality and essential results. jSTow, there is a 
religion that does deny souls, and knows no con- 
scious personal immortality. What of that religion 
— the religion of Buddha — so far as concerns happi- 
ness in this life? It is the apotheosis of misery, the 
religion that declares that life is not worth living, 
and that the supreme good is the entire escape from 
personal being. Observe, where suffering is glorified, 
is made a sort of deity that devours the very notion 
of life, the religion instead of saving from pain, is 
one that arrests progress, that entirely bars secular 
action, that prevents the highest social forms of life 
from being realized; and these, precisely, are the 
results that have followed the religion of Buddha. 
Again, there is the notion abroad, clothed, too, 
in the terms of a very large and audacious philoso- 
phy, that we might find in matter or in force a sub- 
stitute for God, or, at least, the term tliat could best 
express the permanent and efficient course of the 
world we know. Now, note, I will not discuss the 
question from the metaphysical point of view, other- 
wise I should ask — pray, how do you know matter, 



240 Religion in History. 

and what may matter be? If you subtract mind and 
the qualities mind supplies to matter, what of 
matter may remain, and what of your knowledge 
of its qualities? A late distinguished thinker, 
John Stuart Mill, defined matter as the permanent 
possibility of sensation, but he carefully avoided 
telling us what the permanent possibility of sensa- 
tion meant. Does it mean the permanent possibility 
of force, or does it mean the permanent possibility 
of mind? Sensation is a mental state, something 
caused or experienced, derivative therefore and not 
ultimate; its essential element is the conscious, the 
perceived, the felt. And so to speak of matter as a 
permanent possibility of sensation makes it subjec- 
tive, not objective, that which is known through 
mind, not capable of definition otherwise than in its 
terms. Or suppose you take a distinguished physi- 
cist, Professor Tyndall, who in a large way in a 
presidential address to the British Association led 
us an excursion into a past which he very imperfect- 
ly knew, indeed, could not be said to know at all. 
He there told us — matter has the promise and the 
potency of every form and quality of life, but when 
we began to seek after this matter, we were told it 
is mysterious, an inscrutable power, somethimg 
utterly unknown. And if we call in the great master 
of Agnosticism and ask him for his proof that matter 
or force is the known ultimate, he will tell you that 
you know it because it resists you. The force with- 
in meets resistant forces without, and you know, 
therefore, matter to be. But, look, take away the 
force within, and what of the forces without? You 



Christian Religion in Modern Life, 241 

must postulate will, or how can jou discover or 
conceive force? you must postulate thought, or 
how can you find matter or describe what property 
or quality it has? 

But leaving aside the metaphysics, and looking 
at the question as one concerned merely with a basis 
for society and state, for an order and law to help 
the men who work, what then? Well, if matter 
be the ultimate or causal reality, it means the reign 
of the mechanical, the necessary, the reign of force, 
but, mark, when it conies to be applied as a reign 
of force to life, to the region of social and industrial 
structure, hoAv does it act? The weakest go to the 
wall, the strongest survive. All that are feeble 
perish or are crushed, all that are mighty reign and 
endure. When it comes to the region of political 
life, what is the action? The same. Might is the 
regnant force or power, strength is victor; the king 
is the person who is mightiest, the one who has 
subdued all. Translate that into speech for modern 
times, and it means this: wherever you have most 
might, the greatest strength and the power to use it, 
there you have the source of order, the power that 
reigns, the very reason and essence of government. 
But what do you call that? Why you call it tyranny, 
despotism, the hardest, most obdurate and inflexible. 
Thus from mechanical force, taken as the ultimate 
datum of consciousness and factor of change, and so 
as the new basis of social order, we shall have the 
worst tyranny the world ever saw, tyranny that 
would throw life away without grudge or care, 
tyranny that would expel morality, annihilate pro- 



242 Religion in History, 

gress, and make the rich ever richer, the poor ever 
poorer, marching onward like a mighty law of nature 
which sets its ruthless foot down on every feeble 
cause, crushing under it everything that could not by 
sheer and simple might assert its right to be. That 
reign would be the ruin of all our noblest order, the 
loss of our grandest gains. 

Now I would it were possible to look at some of 
the ways of evading this conclusion that have become 
very fashionable in these recent years. One distin- 
guished thinker wrote lately on ^ ^ The Religion of the 
Future," and another not less distinguished thinker 
described his doctrine as ^^ The Ghost of Religion," 
and went on to propound the grand Comtean thesis 
of a religion of humanity, where humanity was the 
object of worship, and humanity was loved, and 
served as the modern and natural deity. Now, I 
have no special care or concern to ask respecting 
the genesis of Comte's idea of humanity as a great 
being. But what his disciples think concerning that 
as a grand new generalization of positive science and 
philosophy only shows their pathetic innocence as to 
the actual facts of history and faith. There is a 
notion of collective humanity far grander than 
Comte's. There is a notion of humanity which 
makes it one immense family, a family of God; 
makes it one ^immense society, a society of sons 
who are brothers — one immense household, where 
every member is bound to serve the others, that by 
this service he may the better serve his own Eternal 
Father. That was a grander idea than Comte's, 
penetrated throughout by a principle of tremendous 



Christian Religion in Modern Life. 243 

energy, which could build up and organize the race 
into a vital unity. His is but a headless humanity, 
an aggregation of atoms, no living organism. It 
rises, he knows not whence, moves across the earth, 
and vanishes, he knows not whither. But this is a 
humanity lifted into eternity, living in the life of 
God, a humanity loved of God, redeemed of Him, 
intended to be perfected in all its parts and in all its 
members, that it may live in holiest fellowship Avith 
Him. Every man Avho does good unto the least of 
men, does it unto God: practical beneficence in time, 
the love that suffers unto the saving of man is the 
noblest service of the Eternal. That is a sublime 
idea. In its presence the positive notion is indeed 
the veriest ghost of religion, spectral, impalpable, 
impotent, save to the visionary who sees it. 

3. Let us came back, then, to our position, though 
only that we may re-affirm it the more strongly; the 
Christian religion is by virtue of its very nature crea- 
tive of a new mankind, constitutive of a new society. 
Its fundamental principles are architectonic, supply 
at once the basis and the regulative ideal for the 
renewed humanity. It is meant to create a perfect 
state through perfect men, and it certainly does not 
mean to leave its renewed men under the control of 
an unspiritual order. Do not think that I am speak- 
ing new things, they are things as old as Christianity. 
At its birth our religion was possessed of a divine 
ambition, for it was inspired by divine truth, and 
articulated a divine design. Christ's coming was 
no accident: it had been purposed from eternity. 
Nature and man had been alike founded on and bv 



24:4 FieUglon in History. 

Him. So one apostle said: ''All things were made 
by Him, and without Him was not anything made 
that was made.'' He was "the true Light" and 
'' the true Life/' and there was no true life^ no true 
light, in the world that did not come from Him. 
Another apostle said, ' ' By Him were all things 
created that are in heaven and earth; " and ''in Him 
all things hold together," stand in order or system. 
As He is the source, He is also the means and end, 
for through Him and to Him are all things. And 
so He is represented, not only as the Head of the 
Church, but as the One in whom all things, both 
which are in heaven and on earth, are to be gathered 
together, summed up, or made into a unity. Now 
ideas of that kind signify a large faith, the faith that 
all things were created and constituted in Christ, that 
as He is, on the one side, the image of the invisible 
God, so He is, on the other, the ideal or regulative 
principle of the visible creation. Applied to our 
present subject this means, that Christ was intended 
to be, in the fullest sense, a Saviour, not only of the 
individual, but also of society, making the man 
new, but doing it that He might renew mankind. 
Within Him were the energies needed to create a 
perfect order, a holy society, a humanity that should 
articulate the Creator's ideal. The work that He 
came to do was to reconcile man to God, to bring 
alike our nature as persons and the order in which 
we lived and worked into harmony with the will of 
God. And so He was the Son of Man who made 
man into the Son of God, the Redeemer, delivering 
from sin, the Saviour, bringing into life eternal. The 



Christian Religion in Modern Life, 245 

grand thing about His mission was its positive aspect 
— His saving man, and the completeness of His sal- 
vation. The Christian religion had indeed an awful 
sense of sin, a deep sense of misery; but that is only 
the reverse side of its majestic se«nse of God, its 
sublime idea of man. It is because it conceives man 
to be so great that it feels his sin to be so terrible; 
it is because it conceived man to be so near of kin to 
God that it allowed him such susceptibility to suffer- 
ing, such faculty of gain, such capacity for loss. But 
as was the loss, so is the salvation. It is not finished 
when a man is forgiven, or has obtained peace with 
God; it is completed only when Christ is all and in 
all — that is, when humanity has been built up in all 
its parts and regulated in all its relations by the ideal 
of love and sonship that had lived from eternity in 
the bosom of God. 

III. 

You see, then, there are, as I conceive it, archi- 
tectonic principles in the religion of Christ; and it is 
the simplest and most rudimentary of these that I 
wish to apply to our political, social, and industrial 
questions. This is only a small branch of an 
immense subject; but I am anxious so to handle it 
as to illustrate for our time the significance of the 
Christian religion. These questions will sufficiently 
test its right to be the organizing principle of the 
noblest society, and the regulative law of the truest 
life. 

1. Our political^ social, and industrial questions, 
while distinct, are so related as to form an organic 



246 Beligion in History. 

whole. You cannot touch one without touching all 
the rest; the body politic is as sensitive and as much 
an organic unity, as the body of the living man. 
Our political questions concern man as a citizen, 
with the rights and duties proper to one; they touch 
his relation to the state, and the state's to him. Our 
social questions concern man's place and functions, 
duties and ri'ghts, as a part of a mighty organism, 
whose members are human beings; and view or- 
ganism and members in their mutual relations and 
obligations, as affected by and affecting each other. 
Our industrial questions concern the creation, ac- 
cumulation and distribution of wealth, regard man 
as producer, distributer, consumer, as a being capa- 
ble of toil, yet needing rest, with capital, land or 
money or skill, that he wishes to lend or sell, that 
he may obtain or create a wealthier condition of 
being. These provinces of thought and action, 
though distinct, are inseparable. Every question 
raised in the one has its correlative in the other, and 
the point of unity is man. He is the living and sen- 
sitive atom that thrills with pleasure or writhes in 
pain with every current that passes through the 
body, political, social or industrial. 

i. Now, if we are to consider the Christian religion 
in relation to these questions, we must do so in the 
light of some simple principles, yet they must be 
those of the architectonic order. Now, our simplest, 
yet mightiest, principle is given us in the idea of God 
as manifested in Christ, the Father as declared by the 
only begotten Son. What was the purpose of God 
relative to man, alike in creation and redemption? 



Ghristian Religion in Modern Life. 247 

His good — his highest good. Man may have as 
his chief end to glorify God, but God finds His glory 
— and in the light of Christ's words and work it is 
seen to be the only godlike glory possible — in pro- 
moting the good of man. As He intends that, so He 
means that all the godlike energies in the universe 
shall contribute to it. But what is for man the chief 
good? It consists in two elements, in the union, as 
the moralist would say, of virtue and pleasure, or, 
as the religious man, of holiness and happiness. In 
the state of perfect good, virtue is completely happy, 
holiness has attained beatitude. But what does this 
involve? The perfect man, but also the perfect 
state, the state ordered and administered in perfect 
righteousness, where the virtue within has its mirror 
and reflection in the order Avithout. We could not 
have the highest good with vice, for it is hateful, 
envious, miserable, seeks only to get pleasure, loves 
only to inflict pain; so virtue is necessary, the 
holiness that loves to do the best and obey the holiest. 
Xor could the highest good be found in a vicious 
state; the good, the perfect man may live there, but 
the evil without would hate him, and he could not 
love it; there might be the joy of conflict, but there 
could not be the highest joy, the joy of perfect 
harmony, of the constant motion that is constant rest. 
In order then to the chief good, the righteous man 
must live in a righteous state; virtue within and 
virtue without must dwell together in beautiful and 
holy unity. But if God means that each person 
realize the chief good, what ideal does He set before 
us for society? This : that the individuals composing 



248 Religion in History, 

it shall, every one of theni; be perfectly virtuous or 
perfectly holy, and that the state into which they are 
organized shall in every respect be perfectly ordered 
and perfectly righteous, an altogether good and holy 
state. No less an ideal as respects man, on the one 
hand, and society, on the other, can satisfy the 
Christian idea of God. 

ii. Now this, you will confess, is no mean ideal, 
and rests on no contemptible or ignoble principle. 
We may be an infinite distance from its realization, 
but it is a matter of infinite importance that we feel 
ourselves held bound to work for it and to travel 
with our faces towards it; making, while we do so, 
the present better, and bringing the golden future 
more near. To have conceived this ideal is to feel 
man ennobled, is to have gained a brighter view of 
the prospects and possibilities of our kind. Yet on 
what does it rest? On the notion of God as a 
Spiritual Father and Sovereign on the one hand, 
and, on the other, on the notion of man as Ilis son 
and subject, bound to be obedient to Him and to 
realize His order. Now let me ask you a simple 
question — Do you know any principle so able as 
this to do large and generous justice to the noblest 
possibilities of order and progress in the state, and 
of happiness and manhood in the man? The idea 
of humanity, you say; but Christ created the idea of 
humanity, and divorced from Him it is but a bastard 
idea, at once emasculated and depraved. What 
value is there in an idea that is but an impotent 
abstraction, that gives no moral source, no moral 
sovereio;n, and no moral end to human life, either 



Christian Religion in Modern Life, 249 

individual or collective? If jon renounce this 
Christian principle, where will you find a basis for 
your social structure? for a basis you must find; 
and remember this — as is the basis, such must the 
structure be. Suppose we enquire at the men best 
able to advise us in this matter, really representative 
and creative thinkers, who have attempted to find 
another than the Christian basis for society. We 
shall find that they confirm the truth of the argu- 
ment we have before pursued. There is Hobbes, 
an honest and courageous Materialist, who did not 
fear to deduce from his first principles their 
rigorous logical results. To believe in matter as 
the ultimate ground and cause of all things, is to 
believe in the supremacy and sufficiency of force, 
and in a conflict of forces the strongest must prevail. 
Carry out that doctrine in the arena of politics, and 
you ha^x Hobbes's theory, the most forcible man is 
king. The original state was a state of war, that 
is, a conflict of opposing forces; order came from 
the victory of the mightiest, which means that the 
strongest force prevailed; the victor became the 
sovereign, his will became the law, made the right, 
instituted, constituted the order and relations in 
which the people lived. That is a clear and in- 
telligible theory, massive in its simplicity, rigorous 
in its consistency, but what does it mean? The 
most absolute tyranny, despotism unrelieved. Let 
us try another. Rousseau hated Materialism, but 
wished to flnd a social doctrine that should, apart 
from Christianity, secure to all men their natural 
rights. And what did he propose? The theory 



250 Religion in History, 

of a '^Social Contract." Men met together and 
agreed on the conditions on which they wouhl 
associate; signed^ as it were^ a pre-historical con- 
tract of co-operation, whicli concluded, the}^ laid 
aside their isolation or individualism, and combined 
in a society or state. Those who kept to the 
contract were the lawful citizens, those who broke 
it by claiming too much or by doing too little, were 
the guilty. But, mark, a society held together by 
a covenant or bond is an artificial society; the 
bond, too, is in this case an historical fiction, 
made all the falser by making the savage the 
ideal or standard for the civilized man. Humanity 
bound to fulfil an imaginary primitive bond, has 
lost at once the rights of the present and the 
inspiration of the future, and renounced the idea 
of order and the hope of progress. Again, David 
Hume, subtlest and most consistent of Sceptics, 
always, as we saw, Sceptic-like opposed to the 
highest human liberty, said, ^ ^ Government has no 
other object or purpose than the distribution of 
justice, or, in other words, the support of the twelve 
judges. " And why? ' ^ Every man must be supposed 
a knave," with no other end but his private interest, 
wdiich he must be prevented gratifying at the expense 
of the public. So government in its last analysis is 
a plan which a multitude of knaves have adopted, if 
not for making each other honest, yet for keeping 
by fear of punishment dishonesty within bounds. 
Could you conceive a more miserable basis for 
politics, or one that did more injustice alike to the 
idea and the history of man? It rests on a notion 



Cliristian Religion in Modern Life. 251 

of him so mean that it bemeans everything; it 
appeals to the meanest motives in man^ and makes 
of him a creature who lias interests, but no duties, 
who may need protection, but can exercise no rights. 
It is small wonder that a S3'stem so based should 
liave had no room for liberty, no idea of moral order, 
or faith in the higher progress and wellbeing of 
man. 

Now what, in opposition to these, does the 
Christian religion offer as its grand fundamental 
principle in politics? Its idea of God and its ideal 
of man, viewed in their mutual or reciprocal relations. 
It says: ^^God is the father of man, man is the 
child of God. He wills every man's good, and every 
man ought to attain the good He wills; what is 
possible to the individual is possible to the society. 
He is capable of being virtuous, it is capable of being 
in all its order and relations righteous. The ideal 
that is in him, it is bound to accept, and to work for 
its realization; the ideal that is before it, he is 
bound to regard as his own, and strenuously to do his 
utmost to secure its embodiment. The law of the 
state ought to be in harmony with God's will, and so 
such as shall intend and promote the good of all its 
citizens; the conduct of the citizen ought to be gov- 
erned by the same will, and seek at once the reign 
of righteousness in the state, and its realization in 
the individual. To the good man the law of God is 
absolute and universal, a law alike for persons and 
peoples, designed lo govern all states, and be obeyed 
of all men. If, then, in civil life, there lie a wrong, 
Christian politics ought to redress the wrong; if in 



252 Religion in History, 

social life inequalities or agencies that hinder the 
distribution or creation of good, Christian society 
ought to move against them. Religion cannot be 
satisfied till the ideal of the perfect man in the per- 
fect state be realized." 

2. You see, then, that the Christian religion sup- 
plies us for aU civil and social questions with con- 
structive and regulative principles of the noblest 
kind. In their light politics become the science of 
working out a perfect order in which every man 
shall achieve virtue and attain happiness, that is, 
realize the ideal of humanity latent within him. 
But I can only state the principles: it is impossible 
to apply them in detail to the questions of legislation 
and government. Yet, though only by way of illus- 
tration, let us glance at a question or two. 

i. And first, as being most germane to our subject, 
as concerns our poor. Religion does not regard 
poverty as a normal state, rather as one that ought 
not to be. Where charity is needed, it is a noble 
thing to be charitable, and charity was one of the 
most characteristic creations of Christ. But there is 
something better than charity, a state where it is not 
needed, where all men are able and willing to earn 
their own livelihood, and enjoy what . they have 
earned. Now religion deals with poverty primarily 
as a matter of persons, and it is through persons 
alone that it can be overcome. Laws may mitigate 
its severity, but its removal depends on the kind and 
quality of persons composing the state. The better 
a man is made, the better a worker he is, the fitter 
an agent for the creation of wealth, and the expul- 



Christian Religion in 3Iodern Life. 253 

sion of poYert}^ It is the worthless that waste; 
worth is productive and distributive. It makes for 
itself, but loves also to share with others. Now the 
Christian religion in making good men makes good 
workers, self-respectful, independent, fore-thought- 
ful; in honouring work as no other religion does, it 
dignifies the workman. Yet, if misfortune or disas- 
ter comes, there is no spirit so tender, so helpful as 
the Christian. It will not leave to perish, but helps 
that it may save. And its charity is not of the legal 
order, hurting where it helps; but of the merciful 
order, which is twice blessed, blessing him that gives 
and him that takes. So our religion works at once 
to prevent poverty, and Avhere it must be, is qualified 
so to ameliorate its action that it shall not deprave 
the man. A people wholly Christian could not be 
poor. 

ii. Another question, partly political and partly 
social, is the one now being so much discussed as to 
the housing of the poor. Has religion, as here con- 
strued, any light to shed on it? It insists, in an 
equal degree, on the person and his conditions being 
good. What makes a person bad or compels him to 
live under bad conditions, conditions unfavourable to 
moral and physical health, is a religious wrong. 
Thus, if a man owns a rooker}^, and makes it his 
business to let houses unfit for human homes, he 
must be held guilty of crime before God and against 
man. Religion binds a man to follow no profession, 
to exercise no craft, save one promotive of human 
wellbeing. If it be profitable while injurious, the 
profits only the more add to the sin, because empha^ 



254 Beligion in History, 

sizing its reckless selfishness. Men must live, but 
our means of living must be honourable to be ap- 
proved of religion. And see here its value as the 
power for making right persons. Only mean men 
are capable of doing mean things, while noble men 
alone are equal to noble deeds. Let a man be pos- 
sessed of the spirit of Christ, the charity that seek- 
eth not her own, that seeks generously the good of 
every neighbour, and to him the miserable greed 
that can make money out of the poverty or destitu- 
tion of man is not only impossible, but unholy and 
abominable. 

iii. We have a third question, or rather set of 
questions, connected with what is perhaps the sad- 
dest of all our modern problems, what men call the 
social evil. There is no deeper or viler sore in the 
heart of society, though I may not speak of it here 
as it needs to be spoken of. Yet it is an evil on 
which religion has a pre-eminent right to be heard, 
while also lying under solemnest obligations to speak. 
To it man can never be a mass of organized lusts, 
whose indulgence is to be tempered by prudence, for 
to it man at his noblest is most continent. Of all 
humankind, there is none poorer, no wretch more 
contemptible or base, than the lustful man, capable 
of working grief to a woman, heedless of her sorrow 
or shame, her sad, blighted, lost womanhood; capable 
of hiring for the indulgence of his bestial passions 
a poor fallen creature, forgetful that even wrecked 
womanhood ought to be sacred to the man who is a 
son, and had, or has, a mother. Could I compass 
it, I should make every such lustful man a man to be 



Christian Religion in Modern Life. 255 

punished, for there is no greater foe to social good, 
no force that so threatens the peace of every virtu- 
ous home. Yet, how is he to be reached, how dealt 
with? Not by outer laws simply, not by external 
restraints, not by preaching the prudence that tem- 
pers passion only that it may be the longer indulged; 
but by filling him with a spirit too great, too hon- 
ourable, too noble, too full of chivalrous chastity 
to feel the passion of lust, or the fascination of 
base desires. And only one supreme love has 
been able to accomplish that. The love of Christ 
has been the love of purity, both in man and woman, 
the love of God has ever been love of chastity, bind- 
ing man to too noble issues to allow him to stain his 
manhood with impurity, or to deprave womanhood 
by his passions. Were that love to reign in society, 
we should soon see realized the highest social good, 
iv. But now we must come, though for the briefest 
glance, to our Industrial Questions. One thing 
Religion cannot do — it cannot lose sight of man as a 
living, reasonable soul; but what Religion cannot do. 
Political Economy did. Its founder, Adam Smith, 
was not responsible for that. The author of the 
^^ Wealth of Nations '' was also the author of a system 
of Moral Philosophy. And do you know its peculiar 
doctrine? It was based on feeling, on sympathy; 
it was your feeling for man, your sympathy with 
him, that made you approve what promoted his 
good, disapprove what hindered it. But the men 
who followed Adam Smith forgot his ^^ Theory of 
Moral Sentiments," and dealt with wealth as if the 
factors of its creation and distribution had been mere 



256 Keliglon in History, 

tools, instruments, pieces of mechanism. You know 
Sismondi's question to Ricardo: — ^' When then ! is 
wealth everything? is man nothing? " And wealth 
was everything to the political economist, man 
valued only in relation to it. And it was this in- 
difference to men that made political economy to 
Carlyle, Adam Smith's great countryman, the ^^ dis- 
mal science." But who creates? who distributes? 
who accumulates wealth? Who but man? And man 
is greater than any product, or any process of pro- 
duction, or even all the creations of his hand or 
genius. And no product is good that does not help 
to make the producer happier and better; and only 
as the producers are improved can the products go 
on improving. And so the science that does not 
take men into account is no true science of wealth. 
For what is wealth? A state of weal. The common 
wealth is the state of common weal. And what is 
that? The state of good to all. Now wealth is not 
money, but what constitutes man's weal; it is the 
wellbeing of the living. The only wealth of nations 
is the weal of the peoples; to be rich in persons, 
rich in the varied elements that make life good to 
all, is for a nation to have wealth, and to be wealthy. 
Here, as elsewhere, persons are supreme. Give us 
persons of the right order, producers, consumers, 
capitalists, labourers, and all other things will be 
added — they will adjust themselves into an order 
promotive of the common good. Treat all questions 
in industry as questions in religion, and it is certain 
that those great problems which perplex the present 
will become problems solved. 



Christian Religion in Modern Life. 257 

(1) But, to select an example or two, take our 
problems as to land. There are no questions men 
speak more of to-day. Yet here the supreme thing 
is the good of the people. All legislation relative to 
land ought to liaA^e that good prominently in view. 
There is no law of God, there ought to be no law of 
man, that so favours the man who owns property in 
land as to enable him to dispossess the people. He 
owns it for their good. Even where his rights are 
recognized, and I recognize them most soundly, he is 
still, in his very rights, trustee of a great national 
possession, not for his own weal simply, but for the 
common good. The rights of property concern a 
class, and are based on fultilled duties, Avhich concern 
the whole people. I am come of a long race of 
farmers, and love the soil. My grandfather owned a 
little farm of a hundred odd acres, and he farmed 
the land he owned. One who loved him as became 
a daughter used to tell how once, in the corn-law 
times, when the proprietors cried, ^^ Let us have more 
protection," the great lord of the neighbourhood 
came to visit him, and to ask him to sign a petition, 
praying that still higher duties might be imposed; 
and the old man said, ^^Xo! I will not sign." 
^^What! not sign? It will enhance the value of 
your land." ^^Sir," was the reply, ^'I will never 
enhance the value of my land at the expense of the 
people's food." And he there stated the great 
principle of religion in the matter. He was a religious 
man, and as such known and revered all round, and 
he only thus expressed in a practical article the faith 
by which he lived. The land was meant to serve 



258 Beligion in History. 

the people's good whilst maintaining him. Without 
it the people cannot live^ on it the people have a 
right to live^ and so it can become no man's absolute 
possession^ to be done with as he wills. The rights 
of property in land, pushed to their last legal limit, 
might easily become a more oppressive and disastrous 
tyranny than the divine right of kings to govern 
wrong; but the principle alike of the Old and New 
Testament, — the land is for the people, their possession 
before the Lord, — limits and defines these rights. 
The people have not lost their rights in the land by 
ownership becoming personal; nay, have only, in a 
sense, the more fully secured and affirmed them. 
Communal was exchanged for personal ownership, 
that through personal responsibilities and action the 
riches of the soil might be the more increased and 
extensively distributed. It happened not that all 
the rights might be concentrated on the head of the 
possessor, but that all the capabilities of the posses- 
sion might be developed and diffused. Unless this 
result follow, personal ownership may become a pub- 
lic wrong, and what has become that may become an 
evil not to be borne. Trusts faithfully discharged 
are rights firmly secured; personal ownership held 
and exercised for the public good is the only owner- 
ship above the need, and so above the fear, of 
change. 

(2) But these are only general religious and 
Christian principles applied to an economical question, 
and all that is here possible is to state them. Now 
this statement ought to lead up to other and varied 
questions, especially those connected with capital and 



Christian Religion in Modern Life. 259 

labour. Xow, if this question were approached from 
the same point of view as one of mutual duties, which 
imply and recognize mutual rights, how simple it would 
become! Where a man works as a religious man to 
God, he will do it, not as for wage, but as best effort 
for noblest purpose. Then his ambition will not be 
to do as little and get as much as he can, but to do 
the best his skill and energies will allow. Where 
the employer is religious, he will recognize that he 
has duties he owes to his workmen, and his ambition 
will be not to deal with them as ^' hands," machines 
that differ from his engines only in being more un- 
stable and irregular in their action, but as souls, to 
be loved as such, and handled as rational and re- 
sponsible and sensitive men. If your questions are 
determined as questions between men who have great 
moral obligations both in working and employing 
work, the mutual duties will solve and unite where 
mutual interests only embitter and divide. But the 
supreme necessity is here, as elsewhere, the order of 
persons religion has created and can create. Men" 
who seek each other's good will harmoniously promote 
each other's weal. Men who believe that they con- 
stitute a brotherhood before God will do generously 
by each other in all questions of economical and 
industrial relations. 

There are also other questions, such as those con- 
nected with amusements for the people — which I 
could have liked to notice, but must leave alone. 
This question of amusements is one that requires 
wise methods of solution, for there is nothing we 
have more need to do than to make life a little more 



260 Eeligion in History, 

beautiful, fuller of promise and gladness for labour- 
ing men. We all ought to feel that a people has 
a right to be happy, and happy all good men will 
seek to make them. But all I can say is, let the 
great moral principles of religion be expressed in 
our economical methods and laws, and we shall be 
sure to realize the highest and most beneficent state 
of being. 

My hope for the future is in the ideal of Christ. 
My hope for man is in a more perfect and complete 
embodiment of the Christian religion. When I look 
abroad and see the disintegrative agencies that are 
hard at work, the one thing I am anxious to do is 
to bring the great constructive, the great architect- 
onic principles of our Christian faith into relation 
with life and action. Every Christian principle 
embodied in law or society, every Christian deed 
accomplished in industry, helps on the happier time. 
I have come for these six nights out of my own 
^study in obedience to no call but the call of duty as 
my conscience apprehended it, to speak to you, my 
Fellow-townsmen, on matters that are alike to you 
and me matters of the most vital and transcendent 
interest, whether as men who work in time or men 
destined to live in eternity. 

I have endeavoured to show you the principles 
which have done most for humanity in the past; and 
to make manifest to you, that if in this living present 
we are to have real and highest welfare, a wealthier 
state and wealthier men, because men who have 
realized their manhood's highest state and truest 
weal, then we must be men more and more baptized 



Christian Religion in Modern Life, 261 

into Christ, possessed of His truth, inspired by His 
love. Then when so inspired, working the work of 
time as in eternity, building on this earth a city, 
meant to be the great city of God, we shall hand on 
to a brightening future the nearer fulfilment of the 
promise which came to the ages through Jesus Christ 
our Lord. 



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SPIRITUAL DEVELOPMENT 

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RELIGION IN HISTORY 

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